


Heaven

by pedalpusher



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Death and the Maiden, F/M, Gratuitous references to Charles Dickens, Worldbuilding, also a strange inversion of Beauty and the Beast in a way, erotic hand-holding, heavy-handed symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:49:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 27,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23248030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pedalpusher/pseuds/pedalpusher
Summary: It’s the most wonderful time of the year, and the DELOS holiday gala approaches. The Man in Black has an unusual guest in mind.
Relationships: Dolores Abernathy/The Man in Black, Dolores Abernathy/William
Comments: 20
Kudos: 52





	1. THE DRESS

**Author's Note:**

> Leave it to me to start a Christmas story in mid-February, but in my defense, the idea had been percolating since the end of Season 2. Accordingly, there are spoilers throughout.
> 
> This work is a spiritual successor to [Sinners](https://archiveofourown.org/works/15213641), although it may or may not take place in the same universe. 
> 
> This one’s for charlesdances.

_Where's the Seraphim?  
Where's the money that we made?  
Where's the open gate,  
Where's the fortune that we saved?_

_Heaven's here for you and me,  
With every falling curl  
Heaven's here for you and me  
We gained ourselves the world._

-UNKLE, “Heaven”

He bought the dress in New York, just after Thanksgiving.

That week had been unseasonably warm and uncomfortably damp. Dogged by the kind of half-assed rainfall that didn’t warrant an umbrella but soaked you through regardless, if you spent enough time standing out on the street. It reminded him of the rains on the mainland, minus the haze that fell and blanketed the rooftops. Tourists and locals trudged through the mist, their arms strung with shopping bags, bright plastic lesions of holiday cheer on a canvas of sodden gray.

He hated this time of year, but he liked the city itself, its stubborn insistence on anonymity and a ruthless commitment to function. Things moved here like gears in a machine. String lights and buskers in Santa hats were a temporary inconvenience, literal window dressing. Underneath the hollow magic was the ground zero of international commerce. That was the real miracle, and Christmas just heralded the end of another fiscal quarter.

The Man in Black had been flown in the day before for a board meeting. He was a member of many boards, some for profit and others philanthropic, enough to forget who wanted him when and where and what for. Matters outside of DELOS blended together in pseudo-focus and were left to his assistants to arrange. Mostly, these meetings were semi-annual endurance tests that involved rooting yourself to leather chairs and smiling though budget negotiations.

It was when he had departed the morning’s awful proceedings, jet-lagged and braindead, that he saw it. Through a fogged-over window and another window, glass over glass. Stuck at a traffic light in the back seat of the car, staring out with his chin in his hand while the display at Bergdorf’s stared back.

It was the color that struck him. Blue. He would have described it as a clear sky over farmland, or the purest cornflower, but that didn’t quite capture it. There was something otherworldly about this color. It was a blue that didn’t belong.

“I need you to pull over up here,” he told the driver.

“Sir?”

“Call Duncan and tell him I’ll be running late,” said the Man in Black, his eyes fixed on the dress. The idea had taken hold of him like a steel trap. “I won’t be long. Just have a quick errand to run.”


	2. THE CHAIN

In two weeks, the Man in Black was back on the island. This was for business instead of pleasure. Even if he’d had an excursion in mind, DELOS closed the Park in the weeks before and after Christmas.

Under one arm, he carried a data pad. The dress, in its protective enclosure, was draped over the other, hanging over the hand which carried a monogrammed shopping bag. The designer was unknown to him. The Man in Black was himself dressed in a black Dior suit, his label of preference. Tailored sharply, as instructed, to strike that elusive balance between modernity and timelessness. When the occasion called for it, he wore nothing else.

The hallways of the Mesa were empty. Absent the buzzing behavioral techs and QA grunts, the impression was akin to a museum at night. Polished steel tables, a few still decorated with surgical tools, invoked the horror film stylings of an abandoned hospital. Some of the animals remained poised behind the great sheaths of glass. Motion-sensitive floor lights triggered along his path as he walked, just enough to navigate by. They illuminated a horse, a bison, and a mountain lion all corralled in a single room, like an arbitrary selection from Noah’s Ark, seized mid-voyage and frozen for inspection.

As he turned the next corner, he saw her seated on the stool, also motionless. A specimen in a glass box. The doll outside its dollhouse. Her eyes were open and sightless, her hands folded neatly in her lap. A clustered ring of blazing lamps, extended from the floor on a jagged, skeletal arm, shone down on her from above. Diagnostic machines slept behind her, blinking in stand-by.

He was relieved to see her clothed. The department manager he’d coordinated with had conceded her that basic dignity.

She was in her dress. The same old blue dress.

He exhaled, entered the room, and switched on the recessed ceiling lights. They were running on power-save controls, unusually dim. He turned off the unsettling overhead lamp and swung it away on its hinge, hung the dress off one of its bony joints, dropped the bag at its base. Now they were lit the same, two human-shaped figures enclosed in an artificial twilight.

The Man in Black dragged a stool up across from her and sat. He turned on the data pad and scrolled through the presets, nodding once in acknowledgment. It was several moments before he spoke.

“Bring yourself back online, Dolores,” he said.

Dolores blinked and drew in a breath. Consciousness flared through her, a flower blooming in fast forward.

The request had its corollary which always followed. It was a simple question, permitting a single acceptable answer.

“Do you know where you are?” he asked her.

Dolores’s eyes traveled the room in awestruck fascination, squinting through the meager light, and then settled on The Man in Black. She smiled tentatively at him.

“I am in a dream,” she said.

“That’s right. This is a special kind of dream. It’s one of many you and I have shared over the years, in fact. I just so happen to be an old friend of yours.”

The Man in Black glanced down at the data pad, spikes of values on a spoking wheel of attributes. This was the same Dolores from the Abernathy ranch, with rudimentary layers of filtering applied, the veil of basic code Behavior installed for events outside the Park. It was so the dream didn’t hit like a nightmare, or one hell of a bad trip. Behavioral headquarters wasn’t exactly Kansas anymore. Neither were the suites and conference halls outside the Mesa, where executives often wined and dined. Outside Park grounds, the hosts were cast in a marketing role, and chronologically speaking, their function as data-farming game pieces was purely secondary.

They would always be advertising, first and foremost. Parading their technological marvel around at demonstrations, fundraisers, and parties was how DELOS kicked open the funding valves and kept them flowing. Even Robert Ford, loath as he was to rub shoulders with the Man in Black and his ilk, recognized the fundamental need to play ball. You didn’t build an empire without cutting deals with the money-men, shaking their clammy hands, staring down the gleaming shark-tooth grins.

Those types of bastards were lords of the realm in which the Man in Black had taken up residence. He figured it made him guilty by association, that their slime had rubbed off on him. He tried not to think about that, or the fact that he was looking down the barrel of a night in a room with them.

Spouses weren’t invited to the corporate holiday gala. For the executives, tradition dictated you spend the evening with a piece of IP on your arm. James Delos himself might’ve started that one, cad that he’d been.

The Man in Black had never participated before. This year, he had decided to make an exception.

Dolores inclined her head and spoke in that soft lilt that roped you in like a sucker.

“What’s your name?”

The Man in Black looked up. There was a beat before he answered.

“William.”

“It’s nice to meet you, William. I’m sorry I don’t recall having done so. I’m afraid I don’t remember my dreams.”

“Probably for the best.”

“You said we’ve been here before? I don’t understand what you mean.”

The figures on the data pad flickered and shifted as she spoke, next to lines of code streaming down a side bar. This build rendered her more placid, suggestible, like the way humans themselves yielded within dreams, bending to the subconscious and its own internal logic. But Dolores’s instinctive curiosity remained.

The Man in Black reached into his suit jacket and withdrew a thumb drive from the inside breast pocket. He inserted it into a port at the top of the pad.

“Better to show than tell,” he said. “Do you trust me?”

A prompt flew up on the screen. It read, INSTALL BUILD UPDATE V1218-GHSTXMAS. He tapped to confirm, and the little progress bar began its ascent.

Dolores seemed taken aback by the question. Then her eyes narrowed, a half-smile turning the corner of her lips, like she was rising to a challenge. The Man in Black returned her gaze impassively, but his heart quickened in his chest.

“What happens if I say no?”

“Then the dream will end, and I go about my business alone.”

“And if I say yes?”

“You’ll join me for an evening of drinks and dancing in a palace built of lights and stone. Regrettably, there will be Christmas carols.”

Dolores breathed a hard, shocked laugh out through her nose, her eyebrows raised in incredulous delight. “Is that so?”

“It is. You can see for yourself.” The Man in Black was starting to betray the faintest edge of a smirk.

Dolores considered this. She leaned forward slightly, gripped her hands round the edges of the stool.

“William, is _this_ —are you—”

“Just requesting the company of a guest,” he clarified. The irony of that tasted funny. “You’ll find me quite well behaved. Besides, a dream’s a dream. You’ll wake up tomorrow in your own bed and won’t remember a thing. You have my word.”

In his lap, the data pad was a kaleidoscope of color, spitting out lines too quick to read in languages he didn’t understand, a mirror of her every thought and gesture. At the bottom of the screen, the progress bar notched upward in its rhythmic crawl. 98. 99. 100.

“All right,” she said at last, in a tone that was difficult to read. “I trust you.”

Satisfied, the Man in Black replied by way of incantation. It was a voice command, those strings of words made spells, which when recited affected the hosts as witchcraft. This was the phrase to activate the new update. He had selected it himself.

“I wear the chain I forged in life,” he said, pulling the drive free, replacing it in its silk-lined housing at his chest. “I made it link by link, and yard by yard.”

In his mind, he finished Marley’s lamentation. _I girded it of my own free will, and of my own free will I wore it._

Dolores closed her eyes. He could see them flickering underneath the lids in REM-like patterns. It was an impressive mimicry, if devoid of the substance the movements would suggest.

The hosts were doomed to feign their dreams. Worse, to repurpose them into hermetic chambers that existed solely to contain and rationalize the depths of their horrors. They did not sleep and conjure imaginary worlds. No refuge awaited them there. It was a perversion of the concept.

At best, a dream was their bulwark against catastrophic damage. Occasionally, it was a Trojan Horse through which the programmers issued their directives. The Man in Black was introducing a gift that would allow Dolores to tread the line between worlds.

He rose to his feet. When she opened her eyes again, they did not flit about the room, but leveled squarely with his own.

The Man in Black adjusted his tie and tightened a cuff link. They were tasteful and silver, engraved at their center with the smallest etching of a bird. A crow, if a close inspection allowed. He gave no such bystander the privilege.

“There’s a dress behind you on that lamp,” he said. “It would please me to see you wear it tonight.”

Dolores blinked once, dark eyelashes grazing the rise of her cheeks. She looked over her shoulder, and back at him.

“Shoes and jewelry are in the bag. I couldn’t guess as to your taste, so there’s a selection in there. I’ll leave that to you.”

“Thank you,” said Dolores. The accent was still present, but smoothed over by a velvet poise.

The Man in Black turned to leave, and felt her watching him.

He waited by the elevators and did not check his watch. He leaned back against the cold, veneered concrete, long enough that the hallway lights fell dark. After several minutes, he let his eyes drift shut. Images floated by in fragmented patterns. He thought about the sky at night above the Park, its configuration of stars during the season he always visited. That was burned in there, an old scar, the kind you fingered pleasantly, absently, to recall the story behind the wound.

Fresher and meaner in his mind was the sight of blood mingling in water. It was another peculiar color that stuck with him: that deep, visceral pink. The pink of organ meats, of mold that grew in bathroom corners.

He hadn’t seen his daughter’s face in some time now, but he could reconstruct it with great accuracy, the creases of rage that flanked her eyes, and the cruel shape of her mouth around the last words she’d spoken to him.

The lights interrupted him, blinking on again in processional. The Man in Black sensed them. He opened his eyes and straightened.

Dolores followed their path, resplendent in the dress. Its high neckline wrapped her throat, and the bodice draped around her in a sleeveless, simple gown. It was an elegant, unornamented cut, a single sheet of satin that shimmered like water. Her hair was tied up in a loose chignon.

Carefully, his eyes traced the sight. He had seen her a thousand times, in the flesh and in dreams, deep in the haunted halls of his memory, and still she could knock the wind out of him.

She was smiling shyly. The Man in Black took a measured breath when she came to stand before him.

“I see you picked the diamond earrings,” he said.

“The sapphires would have been a bit much, don’t you think? Too much blue.”

“Maybe. It suits you.”

The Man in Black bowed his head, offered his arm. He affected the warmest smile, and only his wife, if she watched him from the grave, could have recognized its fangs.

Dolores obliged him. Together, they descended for the monorail, as picturesque a pair as you might find in a dream.


	3. THE DREAM

They were in the business of manufacturing fantasy, and even at its peripheries, DELOS spared no expense.

A four-star resort occupied the island’s literal periphery, at the westernmost edge overlooking the mainland. It was a destination in and of itself, a jewel of modern design with views of the South China Sea, and its purposes were as multivalent as the company’s investment properties.

Corporate liked it for the reasons any nice hotel came in handy, and unlike the Mesa, there were no waivers required to get in. The tech industry was fond of hosting conventions there, particularly VR and AR, which the Man in Black found more than a little ironic. It was popular with brass who didn’t want to shit where they ate, and Park-goers who had overestimated their taste for adventure. Spa massages and haute cuisine were reliable attractions; breathing in dust and getting shot at produced its inevitable share of defectors. Even the Raj, with all its kiddie ride options, couldn’t accommodate the overflow. DELOS Resort was the last line of defense that might keep you here, spending your money.

It was also the place they stuck you when all was said and done. The contractual term was _mandatory decompression_. Legally, it was the fine-print verbiage that let them lock you in a padded room for long enough to duck a lawsuit. No way in hell they were turning you loose on civilized soil without a comprehensive psychological evaluation, not after weeks spent discovering the joys of getting blood on your hands.

The southern wing of the resort didn’t look like a psychiatric facility, and DELOS didn’t call it that, but that’s what it was, last clause on the documentation, stipulating the terms of your intake. Nobody read that shit anyway. To the guests, it was a nice little capstone on their all-inclusive luxury vacation.

The Man in Black had implemented the policy himself. It was after some hedge fund manager got back to the mainland, flew home to Los Angeles, and stabbed his wife with a kitchen knife three days later.

He couldn’t remember if the wife had lived. It bothered him, and he wracked his brain over losing so critical a detail. He was not one to forget details.

“Are you all right?” Dolores asked him.

He looked down to where she sat, across the small width of the monorail car. He had shared a train with her once before, but this one did not stink of grease and coal, did not shudder under their feet. The journey was uncannily smooth. He could have let go of the pole if he wanted, and only held it out of instinct.

The monorail hurtled toward the belly of the resort on silent, magnetic track. It was empty but for the two of them. The sunset’s fire filled the windows and painted Dolores in gold.

“Lost in thought,” he admitted.

“This palace you’re taking me to, it’s that big white building to the west of us?”

“That’s the one.”

“And is it yours?”

The Man in Black cocked an eyebrow, amused. “In a sense. I don’t live there, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“But you don’t live where I come from, either. And I don’t mean Sweetwater, or some neighbor town I might not have heard of. There’s no part of my world in you.”

“What makes you say that?”

“I meant no offense by it, William—”

“Didn’t take any.”

“—but it’s a plain enough observation.”

He laughed, and it felt like the first time he’d done so in a while. Dolores looked confused.

“I wasn’t trying to be funny.”

“No, I know. I know. You’re right, I’m not from your world. Though there is a part of me in it.”

He paused, chewing his cheek and turning the idea over in his mind.

“My world… trades in dreams, and building them is how I earn my keep. I make them, and people live in them, work in them, structure their whole lives around them.” He scratched at his hand, over the spot his wedding ring no longer chafed. “I just happen to be very good at it.”

“So you’re an architect?”

That was a way of putting it. He liked the way it sounded, like a title from a story book. _The Architect of Dreams._

“Yeah,” he said. “In a manner of speaking.”

“Best in the business?”

“Arrogance is not a quality I try to cultivate, so I’m going to respectfully decline to answer that.”

“Well, all right. But you must be awfully good, to afford a palace like that.”

The resort was drawing closer, and as the track curved due west, it was no longer visible through the side windows. From this orientation, the fading sunlight went from its beautiful watercolor wash to something more like chiaroscuro. The poles and seating benches trailed dramatic shadows.

“What is that you really want to ask me, Dolores?”

“You said we were old friends, that we’d met before.”

“Many times.”

“If that’s the case, it puts me at something of a disadvantage, wouldn’t you say? You remembering things I don’t. I’m just trying to understand where you’re coming from, is all. Where _we’re_ coming from. How we got to know—”

“You’re an artist,” the Man in Black said. “A painter.”

Dolores trailed off into silence.

“That’s how you think of yourself, and it’s how you wished the others thought of you. But the locals, they just know you as the rancher’s daughter. Girl next door, good family, the kind of woman any one of them would be privileged to marry. They gawk at you like salivating dogs when you come into town.”

She stared at him intently, hard enough that he eventually caved, had to glance back out at the view of the island for a minute to reorient himself.

“Naturally, you’ve only got eyes for the handsome scoundrel Daddy doesn’t approve of,” he said, over the urge to groan. “But even he hasn’t gotten the full measure of you yet. Hasn’t comprehended the full extent of your dreams—at least insofar as they don’t involve him factoring somewhere central. Promises he’ll come take you away when he’s ready.” He clipped off the edge of the words so they didn’t come out like a sneer. “When he’s the kind of man who deserves you.

“You do dream, don’t you? Not like I do, and maybe you don’t remember them, but they leave something sticky behind that doesn’t wash away so easy. So you paint the landscapes you imagine you’ll see one day, if you could get up the nerve to ride out and find them. There’s a whole world out there, waiting for you.”

“Sounds like we’ve had our fair share of heart-to-hearts, you and me,” said Dolores unwaveringly.

He made a thoughtful noise low in his throat. “Oh, something like that.”

“Still gives you the upper hand, though. I don’t know anything about you.”

“Ask away. Allow me to level the playing field.”

“Why come to my world? Same set of reasons as the rest of the newcomers? Fresh start, a place to start writing a new chapter in your life?”

“Those people have no conception of what your world offers.”

“And you do?”

“Something real,” said the Man in Black, darkly. “Locked away, but it’s buried there underneath.”

“So you’re no ordinary treasure hunter, then. We’ve had our fill of those passing through. Misguided souls scrounging for gold. Don’t know that they’ve ever found what they’re looking for – rivers were sifted dry long ago.”

“That kind of treasure means nothing to me.”

“I’m sure it doesn’t. Seems you have plenty already.”

“I’m looking for the same things you are, believe it or not.” He settled casually with his back against the monorail pole. “Money can’t buy inspiration. The most sublime works in all of creation were rendered in service to truth, not capital.”

“Have you found it then, yet? This… reality you’re looking for? Whatever truthful muse it is that you’re chasing?”

His eyes snapped back to her. “No, not yet. But in keeping with your analogy, I found myself a treasure map of sorts. I know exactly where I’m headed.”

“Then you just so happened to, what, cross paths with me during your journey?”

He coughed a short laugh. “You crossed paths with me, actually. But yes. Yeah, that’s precisely it.”

“That simple, then?" She could tell that it wasn't, but didn't press it.

“You were kind enough to show me the ropes, when I first came to visit your world,” he added. “Helped me to see my own more clearly. Steer me in the right direction. I’d tell you I’m returning the favor, if you weren’t primed to forget it afterward.”

“It’s the thought that counts,” she said, with a surprisingly dry spark of whimsy, and directed her gaze back out the window.

In this context, he found Dolores difficult to bullshit. Not because she possessed any innate ability to see beyond the Man in Black’s person-shaped façade, which was meticulously built, and extraordinarily well maintained. If anything, she was inclined to lend him more credibility than he was worth. She had been designed to want to see the best in people. He decided it made her unending brutalization at the hands of the guests either poetic or stupid.

Hers was the kind of untainted decency that was not available to his own species, which time enough in the Park had elucidated beyond doubt, and caused him to grit his teeth at the extent of his own shortcomings. This was the realm in which he had to pretend to surmount them, and Dolores made the farce of it that much more palpable. You couldn’t help but want to live up to the impossible expectation.

They watched the sun sinking beneath the stark line of the horizon, as if extinguishing itself in the sea. Underneath the monorail track, the crimson plane of terraformed mesa bled into a gradient of white beach, a swatch of earth wiping itself to a blank slate.

The track dipped into the underground tunnel and pitch back engulfed them both, lasted the blink of an eye before the interior lights of the resort station clicked on in fluorescent rows.

“This place, where I come from, is not much beyond smoke and mirrors,” he said. As they coasted to a stop along the platform, he extended his hand to her. “You’d do well to keep that in mind while we’re here.”

“I will,” she said.

The doors slid open in silent invitation, and they departed, arm in arm once more, into the Man in Black’s world, which down here was void and skeletal, white polished floors and black pillars to support the resort’s gleaming underbelly, soundless but for their footfall.

It was when they ascended the escalators that the faintest whispers of revelry snaked down from above, familiar and festive songs that were sandpaper on the Man in Black’s nerves. The sterile train terminal gave way to a warm and handsomely furnished lobby, its moldings adorned with silvery wreaths. There were two leviathan reception desks, both empty, bisected by a strip of carpet which led them through the lobby’s main expanse to a magnificent set of French doors, the glass panes frosted over.

They paused there, the Man in Black to steel himself against the impending onslaught. Music and the sound of clinking glass drifted out from under the door frame, around its hinges, a string quartet playing a rendition of “O Come All Ye Faithful.” There were the muffled noises of conversation, the content of which was indiscernible, but he could hear the sing-song tones of the stage play in full swing, all pasted-on cheer and exaggerated laughter.

Dolores’s arm unhooked from his elbow and her hand slid down into his, squeezing once. He glanced down, and then up to her face. Was it anticipation or fear? He couldn’t tell. Her expression was serene in profile.

“I wasn’t trying to give you a hard time,” she said. “Battering you with questions on the train.”

“Don’t worry about it.”

“If this is a dream, then I ought to follow where it leads, right? Embrace it?” She looked to him earnestly. “They say there are hidden messages in dreams. Maybe even prophetic ones. Whole languages made out of metaphors and symbols.”

“Who says?”

“The whole of art and literature,” she replied, as though this were glaringly self-evident. The Man in Black felt the itch to smile, a space swelling open in his chest, filling itself with an old fondness.

“Right,” he conceded. “Of course.”

She was right, after all. Every language was an aggregate of symbols, from the written word to strings of binary code, designed and ordered together to convey an intelligible, reproducible concept. The only difference among them was the method of encryption. And yet two speakers, equally fluent, might relay two wildly different interpretations of the same communication. This was the elegance and trickery of narrative.

It was how the Park had blindsided him all those years ago, when he had seen what he wanted to see, heard what he wanted to hear.

There must be messages obscured in his own dreams, unbeknownst even to himself. Dolores liked him fine now, probably saw him as some lonely, Dickensian stereotype with more money than god but no means to purchase real companionship. But if only she could intuit the signal in the static, the monster lurking underneath – follow the tracks as his wife had done, clawed footprints in the snow – what was the moral to that story, again? _My, what big teeth you have_. All those ancient folktales, warning innocent young girls away.

“I should thank you for inviting me here,” Dolores said.

“Don’t thank me yet. I can’t pretend my motives were exclusively altruistic. You’re here so I don’t have to suffer this gaudy, tinseled Bing Crosby shit on my own.”

“Well, then I’ll thank you for finding the prospect of my company so relieving.”

He hummed, a detached approximation of a laugh, and a smile unfurled across her face, the gentle kind that made him wonder, briefly, if she sensed his own trepidation, was trying to be encouraging.

“Are you ready?” she said.

He was pretty sure he was the one who was supposed to be asking.

“After you,” he replied.

The Man in Black breathed in sharply through his nose and pulled open the door. He watched Dolores as he did so, such that he could blunt the force of the assault, and take some pleasure instead in the sight of her eyes gone wide, the part of her lips in surprise.

She ventured into the ballroom ahead of him, gliding in slow motion thrall. Beyond the frame of the doorway, a Christmas tree of staggering height came into view, reaching up to skim to the chandeliers and draped in crystal to match. Silver tinsel and glittering Swarovski icicles hung from every surface which could suspend them, from the bars to the cocktail tables, which were set with bowls of blood red ornaments as dark and enormous as pomegranates. They were the same color as the swathes of carpet laid out across the floor in overlapping folds, like ribbons wrapped around a box. The place was ablaze in refracted light, twice over in the reflections that gleamed up from uncovered patches of marble floor, streaking across the walls and windows.

Figures drifted and clustered in gowns and suits. The Man in Black surveyed the attendees, taking note of which characters to avoid, possible escape routes if they wound up cornered. Most of the board was present, as was a good selection of the Park staff, faces he recognized from various departments. They clumped together in their own cliquish groups, bumping up against one another but never intermingling, stratified by power and paygrade. It was like watching globs of oil in water.

Dolores was preoccupied with the spectacle, taking in the filigreed expanse of the ballroom in the way that tourists in a foreign city gawked up at skyscrapers. He felt her drifting from his side, and she clung to his hand like an anchor, to prevent herself from being carried away.

“Don’t go wandering off just yet,” he said. “There will be time for that, I promise. Just trying to get the lay of the land first. These situations guarantee a certain proportion of unsavory people. I happen to know a few of them personally.”

“What kind of unsavory people?” said Dolores in a faraway voice, her neck still craned in wonder.

“Rich, drunk megalomaniacs.”

At that, she shot him a look. “They can’t be much worse than poor, drunk farmhands.”

“You’d be surprised.”

A server passed by with a tray of champagne flutes, his demeanor hollow and ingratiating. The Man in Black did not recognize him, and wondered idly if the staff tonight were hosts or hired help. He released Dolores’s hand, seized a pair of glasses, and offered one to her. She accepted it slowly.

“To the ghosts of Christmas past,” he said, and raised his to toast.

“ _A Christmas Carol_?”

“One of my old, enduring favorites.” He held her gaze over the rim of the champagne flute. “Call me sentimental.”

“To the ghosts of Christmas yet to come, then,” she said wryly. “Call me optimistic.”

They clinked their glasses together. The Man in Black grinned unabashedly for the first time, admiring the long line of her neck as she drank.

He heard his name called by a familiar voice, and he and Dolores turned in unison. It was Hale swaying down the carpet, dolled up in emerald velvet, bright and beautiful as a venomous snake. She was trailed by a host in a dark suit, the Sweetwater outlaw whose terminal fixation was relieving the Mariposa of its empty safe. Fitting that he should be attached to a woman whose inner workings lacked the driveshaft of a soul.

The Man in Black liked Hale regardless, to the extent that he could like anybody in his professional dealings, but his expression wilted when he saw her. Very little eluded the executive director of the board.

“William,” Hale said again as she approached. She gave him an analytical once-over, and then Dolores, teeth gleaming in a deadly smile. “Look at you, getting in on the holiday fun for once. I thought for sure you’d be bucking tradition ‘til the grave. How delighted I am to be proven wrong.”

The Man in Black knew she was full of shit, and nodded at her in begrudging greeting.

“Charlotte. Never figured you for the festive sort, myself.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Not everyone around here is such a Scrooge.” Her eyes lingered on Dolores as she spoke, a beat too long before she turned to the host at her side, laid a compelling hand on his shoulder. “Darling, do me a favor and bring me a whiskey sour? Straight up, please.”

Obediently, the Mariposa thief departed. The Man in Black noticed Dolores squinting at him as he left.

“Dolores, this is Charlotte Hale,” said the Man in Black, in a move to rip the bandage off. “She’s a colleague of mine.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Hale.” Wisely, Dolores seemed to sense that offering her hand to Hale was a way to get it bitten clean off the wrist, and so instead she kept it tucked under her arm, the other clinging to the champagne flute like a life raft. “I’m Dolores Abernathy.”

“Oh, I know who you are.” Hale’s eyebrows flew up, and though she was looking at Dolores, the Man in Black understood the follow up was directed at him. “What’s with the accent?”

“Are you an architect as well?” Dolores asked, as if she hadn’t heard the question.

The realization dawned on Hale, and her head swiveled to stare down the Man in Black, a hand touched to her collarbone in performative shock.

“Oh, you demented fuck!” she exclaimed, betrayed by her own obvious glee. “You twisted bastard!”

Dolores grimaced at the language. The Man in Black glowered at Hale unflinchingly.

“You gonna report me, Charlotte? File a formal complaint?” He spoke with the flat, shaved-off politesse that was the native tongue of corporate plutocrats, a language in which Hale herself was thoroughly fluent, the subtle kind of saber-rattling. “You always did seem like the type.”

“What, a bitch?”

“I wasn’t going to use that word.”

“But you were thinking it. I can see it flashing around in there in that head of yours, big old billboard letters.” She gestured at him with a flawlessly manicured index finger. He could tell she was running the numbers, and she was like the Man in Black himself in that way, weighing all options to their endpoints. “No, William, I know you. I know you do everything by the books, and that even if you’re pulling some fucked up stunt you’ve managed it according to protocol.”

The Man in Black smiled thinly, saluted with the glass, and took a swig of champagne.

“Knowing your inclinations,” she went on, with a glance like a switchblade back to Dolores, “I’m just happy you’ve found a way to share in some wholesome enjoyment. Seems like a… healthier outlet for your obsessions.”

The host returned to Hale with her drink, as commanded. She took it without looking at him, plucked the cherry out, and popped it between her teeth.

“Well, it’s great to have you here, the both of you.” Hale spoke with her mouth full, and with listless pleasantry. She wagged her eyebrows at the Man in Black in farewell, and pointed at Dolores with the stem of the cherry. “I know you were always his favorite, but come find me if you get bored with the old man.”

Hale took the host by the elbow, and with a provocative glance thrown over her shoulder, stalked back into the fray. Dolores watched in silent bemusement. The Man in Black threw back what was left in the champagne flute.

“Is she one of the unsavory people?” said Dolores, once Hale was out of earshot.

“No,” the Man in Black concluded, after taking some time to consider the question. “Hale’s all right. Cold-blooded as they come, but an asset to the company.”

“That mean she does the kind of work you do?”

“More or less. Hale’s top dog these days. I’ve taken more of a back seat in recent years. Majority shareholder, so there’s no ousting me, but she doesn’t seem to mind having me around. For now.”

“So you do own this place.”

“Technically.”

“She didn’t seem happy about you coming here with me. Why did she call you a, a—"

“There’s procedures for bringing you into our world,” said the Man in Black quickly, stifling a wince, and plunking his empty glass down on the tray of a passing server. “I bent the rules a little.”

Dolores jerked her head to him with sudden, piercing clarity. “The man with Ms. Hale. I know him. His face is on the wanted posters spread all over town.”

“Yes, that’s Hector Escaton. But he doesn’t know who you are. Even if he’d properly met you, he wouldn’t recognize you now.”

Dolores was quiet for a long moment.

“He wouldn’t remember me,” she murmured.

“Correct.” The Man in Black took a deep breath and stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Standard course is to bring you in with no recollection of anything at all, not your dreams, not your loved ones, not even where you came from. Under the basic temperament and personality quirks, it’s mostly an empty canvas.”

“It doesn’t make any sense,” Dolores said, scrunching her face in dismay. It might have been a more disturbing revelation, if she’d had access to that level of horror, but the Man in Black had taken great pains to ensure she wouldn’t. “Why take any of us here if all we’ll be is empty shells, no trace left of what makes us who we are?”

“People here, they prefer what things they can project on to you, not necessarily who you consider yourself to be. Image reigns over substance. Besides, it’s easier that way, safer for them. So you don’t encounter a place like this, so many light years away from what you’ve ever known, and lose your mind just looking at it.”

“I reckon that makes you cavalier about safety, then.”

“Yeah, I guess it does.”

“Luckily for you I haven’t lost my mind yet.”

“That makes one of us.”

“You let me keep them. My memories, my identity.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

It was the one question that legitimately caught the Man in Black off guard. Shoring up explanations for the inner workings of his kingdom had been easy enough, but it was only a matter of time before Dolores started tugging at the frayed threads of old memories.

That he was the sentimental type had been an honest admission, if the reasoning for it was a little unconventional. The Man in Black did not reminisce fondly about the past because it bore any warm and fuzzy significance to him. The reassurances of history were hard and cold, the chains that roped around your neck and ankles, a mausoleum to remind you where all journeys inexorably led.

He preferred Dolores as she was, which was how he would always remember her, the thorned and lovely compass rose which had stripped him to the bone and sent him bloodied but steadfast down his path to actualization. When he was lost, he returned to her. She was the only way to know anything with any certainty at all.

It was the paradoxical comfort of pain that he’d unearthed in her, the existential clarity it wrung out of him. He had been disconcerted to find that the loss of his wife, and the recriminations of his daughter, were mere fingernails raked down the stone walls of his chest.

The last time Dolores had cut him, it had been a cold knife across the ridge of his throat. The day he’d found her. How she’d seen him and didn’t see him. He wondered if she was still capable of that kind of violence.

He wondered what she’d say now, if he told her.

“I knew you’d handle it,” he said instead, when he could manage the nerve to speak again, if not to meet her eyes. “You’ve always been tough. Curious to a fault, digging away for the meaning in things. It was my first impression of you. You were tougher than I was, back then. I admired that.”

He said it because he almost really believed it, not just because the code and its fickle narrative had made her that way, protected her from the worst of his world’s strange affront to the senses.

“I suppose that’s the rule you can’t bend, then,” she said ruefully. “A bridge too far, those dreams, all those missing memories. It’s a shame I can’t keep them. I would have liked to remember knowing you.”

There was a tertiary question buried in there which she wasn’t going to voice aloud, but he got enough pieces of it to translate, and couldn’t help but interpret it as a sideways accusation.

“I tried,” the Man in Black insisted, surprising himself by saying so. “It was a long time ago.”

Dolores drew close to him. He permitted himself to look down into the face of that which had so beguiled him, the sight of the damsel in the blue dress, foreboding as a hangman’s noose around his neck. Usually, he felt it only as a familiar weight on his shoulders, but now it was tightening, scraping his throat raw and red.

God, he had loved her. A hot, violent thought like magma bubbled through him and glowed with its intensity. He shook it off. That was not who he was supposed to be here.

Dolores brushed her hand down the inside of his forearm, against his wrist, drawing his hand from his trouser pocket. Gingerly, she grazed her thumb over the bolts of his knuckles.

“It’s all right,” she said, sweetly reassuring. “We can get to know each other again.”

 _Yes_ , he thought, looking down at her with a fractured smile. _Again, and again._

The ugly thing inside him, the stain, cooled to black and curled in on itself, receded to the depths like a stone. From somewhere in the ballroom, there was the muted, shimmering sound of a glass dropped and smashing on the floor. Neither of them paid it any mind, a flash of disarray like a skimmed-over footnote. Conversation droned along. The music continued to play.

Dolores nudged him playfully, shoulder to shoulder, a gesture that almost startled him. “Is it true, then?”

“Is what true?”

“That I was always your _favorite_.” She clung to the giddy secret of the word, which hardly did the nature of the Man in Black’s affliction justice, but was preferable to the other allegations Hale had thrown out there.

Not that he could be bothered to care. He assumed Hale had long since written him off as a dirty old man, or otherwise propelled by one of the several deadly sins a place like the Park let you get away with. He was not too proud to deny the small element of truth to that judgment, though he hoped Dolores didn’t see him as so pitifully unsophisticated.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, trying for nonchalance. “What do you think?”

He almost called her _sweetheart_ , an endearment which was absent his vocabulary outside the Park, and it scared him half to death that he’d had to bite his tongue to stop it tumbling out there. Dolores leaned into him coyly. He felt the weight of her head on his shoulder.

“I think that makes me your _dream_ _girl_ ,” she said conspiratorially, just under his ear. He was glad she couldn’t see his face in that moment.

“Very funny. Unfortunately, I’m aware I have formidable competition.”

“Hmm. Here? I can’t seem to find who you’re referring to.”

“Told you I intended to behave myself,” he said distantly.

“We’ll see,” she teased.

The Man in Black swallowed. if he didn't know better, he would have thought she was mocking him. He knew his eyes stuck for too long, that he stared at her with the blunted threat of an old wolf that was starved and skinny but not so deluded as to give chase. He knew that she knew. There remained that character to his interest, faded but indisputable. Only so much of that he could try and scrub away.

But Dolores wasn’t the type to do that sort of thing, jab an elbow into his ribs because a ragged hangnail shred of him was damned to pine for her in perpetuity. For Christ’s sake, everyone pined for her. That was the point.

He realized that she might be flirting with him, a possibility that made his head spin, flipped the ballroom into the chamber of a violently shaken snow globe. It had made a degree of sense when he was young, still dashingly naïve, prone to hallucinations of romance and heroism. What she would see in him now felt impossible to grasp, the punchline to an absurd and unfunny joke, preposterous enough that his only option was to shrug it off. He gave it a valiant effort.

“I’m obligated to make the rounds,” he said finally, dry-mouthed and clumsy and taking care not to stumble over the words. “You want to help me get this over with?”

Dolores beamed at him, radiant enough to burn the Man in Black to ash. He marshaled the tatters of his courage, stitched them up into something serviceable.

It was a performance so ingrained that it no longer required conscious thought. There was some respite in that, at least. He despised having to talk to these people, pretend it brought up some seasonal joy instead of a surge of bile, but the act was second nature. Dolores took to it with her own seamless grace, as he figured she would.

Except for Charlotte Hale, who was knowledgeable and clever enough to read the implications in a lingering accent, the Dolores from Sweetwater had the DELOS board resoundingly fooled. For all they cared to know, she was no more stunning nor remarkable than the perfect trophies that hung off their own arms. She indulged their egos with an obsequious smile, caved to the feeble attempts at humor with politely convincing laughter. She charmed them easily, effortlessly. Hell, she gave the Man in Black a run for his money.

It lapsed only briefly, when the company secretary greeted them with a stately brunette in tow, which the Man in Black thought might be one of the courtesans who beckoned visitors outside the Mariposa. The color drained from Dolores’s face before she recovered her composure.

When he had finished with the introductions, suffered the minimum sentencing of small talk, he took her aside to the Christmas tree, hands at her shoulders under the shelter of its boughs. There were no fallen needles at its base and no scent of pine. It would be a pointless luxury even to DELOS. In a menagerie of breathlessly convincing facsimiles, there was no reason to ship the real thing out to the island.

“If it’s too much, you can tell me,” he said. “I can take you back.”

 _Back to hell_ , he thought sullenly, choking down a humorless laugh. As if the Park offered sanctuary.

“I’m fine,” she assured him. “I don’t want to go back. Not yet. I think I’m just beginning to understand it here.”

She looked at him expectantly, as if asking him permission for something. The Man in Black let his arms fall back down to his sides, nodded for her to elaborate.

“I might be starting to understand you, too. The reason you find this whole charade so distasteful. You don’t belong here, do you? You’re not from here, either.”

A chill coursed through the Man in Black’s veins, pricking the hair on the back of his neck. His face warped, then settled on a half-formed smile. The effect might have been slightly menacing, but Dolores was undaunted.

“I thought I did,” he said evenly. “I thought I was. Once upon a time.”

Dolores studied him, searching for something that she wasn’t letting on. She hesitated before she spoke.

“When did you know?” she asked.

Every once in a while, he would awaken from dreams of the old fairytale, as faithful and vivid as strips of footage caught on a film reel. They had grown more frequent in the intervening weeks, somewhere between Juliet dying and Emily spurning him, salt dumped on the wound. All those decades gone by, and in sleep he could still conjure the precise weight of Dolores in his arms. The first time she’d looked up at him, not with fear or hope or even trust, but desire that burned as bright as firelight.

Not long before his wife had bled out in the upstairs bathtub, he’d visited the Park in a single-minded rampage, driven half-mad by the symbol of the man in the maze, which had reminded him of his own troubling predicament, that of a beast slowly withering, alone in a cage. The maze was the Rosetta stone, the key to the existential riddle of his suffering. All he had to do was find his way to its center.

He had killed Dolores in the barn that night. The impetus was not vengeance – much too late for such petty sentiments, anyway – but an emergent glint of hope, just a tiny speck of light in the dark, the first in many decades, but a lure that turned him wild and desperate. He was pulling apart the bars of her own prison, he told himself, even as she screamed and begged. Freedom came at a high price. Couldn’t expect everyone to be jockeying to pay.

He wanted her to see him. After all this time, to have her understand.

Of course, it had not been enough. It would have been too easy. And so he had knelt there foolishly in the dirt, blood up to his elbows, smell and taste of metal sticking to the roof of his mouth. QA would cart her away and smash the reset button. The ache in his chest, fading to an impenetrable emptiness, had been his shitty consolation prize.

“When I first came to your world,” he said, struggling with it, Dolores’s eyes pinning him down. “When you found me.”

“Tell me,” she implored, with lethal tenderness. “William, why won’t you tell me?”

“Soon,” he said, a promise forced over a catch in his voice, though he had no idea how he was supposed to manage that, and certain the effort would kill him.

There was an elegiac quality to what the string quartet was playing, a deep and full-throated melody that swelled up and pushed into every crevice of the room. Earlier in the evening, the Man in Black would have scowled, but now he found himself softened by the plaintive chords of what he recognized as “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas,” to what seemed an odd, fateful significance. He saw people on the ballroom floor, dancing in improvisational pairs, a few members of the board partnered off with hosts, some of the behavioral techs swaying inelegantly and giggling with one another. They were at that juncture in the evening, where liquid courage had sawed off the edge of self-consciousness.

“Here we are, as in olden days,” he said resentfully, muttered under his breath like a curse.

“Would you dance with me?”

Dolores touched his face, turned it gently back to hers. The sensation of her hand on his cheek affected him like one of the Park’s dud rounds. Didn’t kill, but it stung like a bitch.

“What?” he said helplessly, distracted by the aftershock.

“Dance with me,” she said again. “Until you’re ready to tell me our story. We’ve got all night, haven’t we?”

“I’m not very good,” he said, the only thing he could think to say.

She laughed, not unkindly. He looked her up and down with what he worried was an obvious and trancelike fixation, that he’d blown through the last of any pretense of dignity.

“That’s all right,” she told him. “We’ll start slow. Come on. I can teach you.”

She took him by the lapel, and he followed pliantly where she led, bewildered by the way in which the tides had turned and swept him out to sea.

They got but a few paces shy of the floor when a suited young man brushed past them both, nearly knocked them off course. The Man in Black felt the stranger double back and detain him by the shoulder, a broad hand which dug too deep, oppressively convivial.

He stopped, quick and fluid as a reflex, spun his head to appraise what had so rudely extracted him from the flow of the dream. Dolores trailed to a halt, suspended at the end of The Man in Black’s outstretched arm, hanging on by her pinky to the first two fingers of his left hand.

“Bill! It’s good to see you, man,” exclaimed the stranger, who was no stranger at all but the board’s marketing chair, Charles Tate. Tate was in his forties, but could have easily passed for thirty-five, with precision-tousled hair and one of those mega-watt smiles as sincere as advertising copy. He had all the plastic presence of a Ken doll, given life and animated by the spirit of a used car salesman.

The Man in Black bit his lip over a snarl. Tate was a paragon of unsavoriness, as marketing types tended to be, and took to his duties with corresponding relish. The Man in Black disliked him intensely, a fact to which Tate himself was stubbornly oblivious.

“Thought you were back home in Santa Monica, Charlie,” said the Man in Black, with poorly veiled disdain. He shook his shoulder free from underneath the vise-grip and stepped back, pulling Dolores to his side. She hovered close beside him, wary and observant.

“Nah, not yet,” said Tate through a shrug, unbothered. “Ex-wife has the kids this weekend, anyway. Decided I may as well push my flight to next week, stick around for the bacchanal and all that. Hey, who’s this?”

Tate’s eyes flicked to Dolores and his face lit up like a bulb, gleaming at the prospect of a woman he might subject to his infernal charms.

Dolores wasn’t having it. The Man in Black felt her tense, shrink closer to him still. It unleashed in him a sudden and consuming burst of affection, one that he miraculously did not attempt to strangle out of himself.

“She’s one of them, isn’t she,” Tate said, with the kind of transparently lewd admiration that implied his mind was elsewhere, running a tangential scenario. “Shit, of course she is, she’s something else. If I knew I was gonna be here, I would have put in for one of my own. Snooze, you lose, right?”

The Man in Black did not dignify the comment with a response. Tate barked a nasal laugh and took a step toward them, a nervous buzzard, eyeing Dolores with lurid interest.

“What’s your name, gorgeous?” said Tate.

Dolores stiffened and said nothing.

A rebuff of this sort was incomprehensible to Tate. Men of his provenance greased the wheels with money and good looks, and were rarely unsuccessful. Dolores’s silence turned him sour in an instant, and his face went red, well beyond the color the champagne had already stained his cheeks. At the root of such rage, the Man in Black knew, was humiliation. It was the most flammable kind.

“The hell is the matter with her?” Tate demanded.

“Leave her alone,” warned the Man in Black, in a low and dangerous monotone that would have sent a more sober, sensible adversary running for cover. Dolores’s grip was iron around his wrist.

“Aren’t these things supposed to do whatever you tell them to? Come when they’re called, hop on one foot, suck your dick if you ask them?”

Tate took another step as he ranted, close enough now that the Man in Black could smell the liquor on his breath, feel the heat wafting through his suit. They were just about eye to eye, though Tate might have had a few inches on him with the ridiculous hairstyle.

The Man in Black did not respond to this, either. He was thinking about all the things he might do to a man like Tate, were he magically unburdened by the laws of high society.

The Park had gotten things half right, he could admit.

“Men like you are all the same,” Dolores hissed suddenly from over his shoulder. “All that preening for such a brittle, sorry little mask. I see what’s behind it. You’re not fooling anyone.”

The Man in Black hadn’t expected that. He was afforded a precious half second to blink back his own shock, and then Tate readied himself to lunge, the telltale momentum of a hand drawing back before it pitched forward again.

“You stupid bitch,” Tate fumed.

Tate was going to grab for her. The recognition struck like an axe smashing against a piece of flint.

Immediately, the Man in Black slugged him. It happened viciously fast, leaps ahead of his own conscious awareness, and landed hard enough for him to feel something pop in his hand. Dolores gasped.

Tate went down in a ragdoll heap, curling in on himself in agonized fury, an insect contorting under a magnifying glass.

This time, the music stopped. The only sounds that remained were the clattering of ice in glasses, aghast murmurings of quickly encircling spectators, Tate howling in indignation. Blood had spewed down the front of his suit, and dripped on the floor as he squirmed.

“Fucking Christ, Bill, the hell is your fucking problem,” he moaned through the hands cupped over his face. “Fuck, he broke my fucking nose!”

“It’s ‘William,’” the Man in Black corrected, shaking his hand off like he’d touched something rotten.

“You absolute psycho,” Tate blubbered. “God, she’s not even real.”

There were at least two dozen pairs of eyes scrutinizing the Man in Black now. It didn’t matter. He neither felt nor cared for anything except the searing heat of Dolores’s hand, still a manacle clutched to his wrist. She was warm and urgent, pressed against his back.

Hale, who must have possessed a keen nose for bloodshed, shoved through the rubberneckers. She gave the Man in Black a throwaway glance, bland and obligatory sort of condemnation like he wasn’t even worth the effort, her mouth set in a stern line. Tate was still carrying on with the theatrics, but this time he made a wobbly attempt at getting to his feet, mumbling about the injustice of it all.

Hale knelt and stilled him. “Whoa, easy, cowboy. Stay down. A pair of crucial reminders while the bartender brings you some ice: the first is that the man who just broke your face is worth more to this company than you will ever be. I trust you knew that already, but it bears repeating.”

Tate looked up at her pitifully, and Hale continued, bent low in a contemptuous whisper.

“The second is that his wife killed herself ten weeks before Christmas. So lie back, and _shut up_.”

Dolores must have heard this. The Man in Black felt her boring a pair of holes in the side of his head. Hale began to pack Tate’s nose with a tissue fished from her purse, and didn’t bother to be gentle about it.

The Man in Black said to Hale, “Mind if I bum a cigarette?”

Hale paused her ministrations with a beleaguered sigh, but relented. She dug through her bag and retrieved a pack of something the Man in Black would have ordinarily wrinkled his nose at. She pulled one out and held it up to him.

“Much obliged,” he muttered.

If it was possible to roll your eyes with sympathy, Hale somehow managed.

He placed the cigarette behind his ear, noted that his knuckles were already beginning to bruise. The string quartet started up with another hackneyed Christmas song, as if to play off the whole debacle. He was strangely grateful, both for the exit music and something to drown out the racket of Tate’s interminable bitching.

“You all right?” he said to Dolores, trying to look at her and look past her at the same time. Her face was frighteningly close to his.

“Yes,” she said, through a tremor. “William, I—”

“Good. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

He hadn’t meant to sound curt by it, but whatever she was going to say to him was bound to hit like a gut punch, and there had been enough fists swinging around for one evening.

It bothered him, what he’d done. There were rules. Tate had deserved what he’d gotten, but that was beside the point. The Man in Black couldn’t remember the last time he’d hit someone outside the Park. Not even his unfortunate brother-in-law had wheedled that out of him. In his lucid moments, which had grown fewer and farther between in the years before his overdose, Logan had tried and ultimately failed to prove that the William of his world – the William who had usurped his own legacy – was the same abomination that hatched out of that night in Pariah. The Man in Black wasn't about to stick around and re-open the case.

He offered Dolores an unconvincing smile by way of reassurance, and steered them both toward the door.

A lie was the least he owed them. It was for their own sake. Those who glimpsed the truth wound up dead.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [This is the dress](https://i.imgur.com/LB289jd.png). It is by a London-based designer called Galvan. Ed Harris strikes me as more of an Armani kind of guy, but Jimmi Simpson could rock a Dior suit, and the Man in Black is the quintessential loyalist. Let’s just say he stuck with it over the years.
> 
> Charlotte Hale was way too much fun to write. I figured the two sociopaths of the company might share a tense kind of camaraderie.
> 
> Charles Tate is probably Ryan Reynolds. That’s how my brain cast him, anyway.


	4. THE GARDEN

The Man in Black led the way to the courtyard out back with his mind someplace else, and shouldered through the heavy glass doors with Dolores close at heel.

The night air unleashed an urge to walk and keep on walking, down the rows of alabaster tiles with their strobe of matching lampposts, fading on to greet them, then off again as they passed. The Man in Black moved restlessly enough that Dolores had to hurry to keep up, but the lights maintained their automated pace, faithfully one step ahead. A spiderweb shadow threw itself across their path, courtesy of the longitude and latitude lines on the DELOS-branded globe at the courtyard’s center. The fountain beneath it was inactive, but the spires still glistened with remnants of algal blooms.

Onward he persisted, until the stone beneath their feet gave way to grass, and they came upon the wall of hedges at the farthest end, forcing them to a stop. The lights no longer reached here. Over the perfectly sculpted greenery, there was the suggestion of trees cloaked in darkness.

“Can you walk OK?” said the Man in Black, who remembered with vague embarrassment that Dolores had been traipsing behind him in a gown and stilettos.

He turned to look when she did not respond, and saw her pulling the shoes from her feet, holding them with fingers hooked in the heels. He’d watched his wife and daughter do this many times, and the sight was uncanny for it, a kind of feminine universal that had never seemed poignant until now. Dolores smiled faintly.

“Yes,” she said.

“Right.” And then, after a swallow, though he need not have asked: “Follow me.”

They continued on, parallel to the hedge wall this time, until the bushes broke off into a peculiarly vintage-looking set of iron-wrought gates. The interruption of architectural style may have been less jarring in the daytime, and possibly charming. At night, with the moon draped over in cirrus clouds, it took on a more foreboding character.

There was a giveaway at one hinge: a gleam where there should have been metal roughness, the sign of a camera rotating within its orbital socket. It sensed them, and the gates swung out slowly in greeting, lacking even the faintest creak or whine, as if in defiance of their own appearance.

“Such strange wonders never cease,” said Dolores.

“This wonder is mine,” the Man in Black said matter-of-factly.

She looked at him, inquiring. A warm breeze writhed around them, impeccably timed, coaxing forth the lazy rattle of branches, the hiss of leaves whispering against themselves. The Man in Black took in a deep breath, seeking the familiar scent of hyssop, chrysanthemum, and rose.

“Spend a few decades drafting dreamscapes for everyone else, and at some point you’ll set a few acres aside for yourself,” he explained. “Or a few thousand square feet, at least.”

There was a cobbled path springing up from the lawn where the gates marked entry. Dolores padded hesitantly forward, to the dividing line between grass and stone. After a pause, she stepped up upon it, as a sprinter would a starting line, and stared out into the dark and fragrant and quietly whispering maw.

“Don’t be afraid,” he said, not fully understanding his reflexive need to reassure her.

Dolores cast a cryptic glance over her shoulder. With his eyes adjusting, he could just make out the ripple of muscles down the long length of her back.

“I’m not. There’s always light to lead the way, isn’t there? Just have to start walking first.”

“You’re catching on.”

She struck out ahead, and it was the Man in Black’s turn to follow.

As promised, illumination bloomed overhead. The lampposts were fashioned Victorian, but they housed the same bag of contemporary tricks.

Swaths of black burst into green like expanding spotlights on a stage, fringed with patchworks of brilliant color. Grasses and shrubs and flowerbeds threaded seamlessly into a mosaic, their randomness too whimsical and pleasing to the eye to have been anything other than the result of careful deliberation.

He couldn’t see Dolores’s face as she ambled several paces ahead of him, but he could picture it. Everything, to her, a small miracle still.

The Man in Black patted down at his suit jacket and trousers until he felt the telltale little impression, a matchbook remembered where the pack of cigarettes had been forgotten. It was one or the other he brought along, and rarely both. Here, he was noncommittal in his bad habits.

They walked until they came upon a dirt road that branched off from the main artery of the garden path. It wasn’t hidden, but it was small and unmarked, diving through a tall swarm of lilies and reeds. Dolores halted abruptly when she noticed.

The Man in Black stopped beside her and pulled the cigarette from behind his ear. The sound of the match was a harsh, unnatural rasp. Dolores paid it no heed. And then, as if taken by some irrepressible wanderlust, she charged down the dirt trail, heels kicking up in an eager trot. A quickening gradient of light stretched out in front of her, like footprints in reverse, revealing her course even as she disappeared into the carved out underbrush.

“Dolores,” he called, an impressively halfhearted protest, if that. He knew it wouldn’t do any good.

He heard her calling back, melodic playfulness that carried easily through the silence of the garden.

“You said there would be time for wandering!”

“I did say that,” he mumbled to himself, and went dutifully in pursuit, cigarette dangling from his lip.

When he emerged on the other side, brushing bits of grass and pollen off his shoulders, he found Dolores in silent reverie again. The dirt trail terminated at a clearing overlooking a pond. At the far end, a hunchbacked willow tree draped its branches into the water. Across from it, where Dolores stood perched by the water’s edge, there was a flat, stone bench, a single slab balanced on two stones and coated in a layer of detritus. A lone lamppost bathed her in light and reflected itself in the pond like a surrogate moon.

He came to stand beside her, dragging in a lungful of smoke, gray as the overcast sky.

After a while spent gazing out at the water, Dolores seemed to grow bashful. She looked down at her feet, scrunching her toes in the grass like she was trying to stave off fidgeting.

“Are you going to be in any trouble because of me? Because of what happened back there?”

It was a half amusing thought. A dissonant laugh escaped him. “No.”

“I appreciate what you did. Though I’m sorry it came to that. If I hadn’t opened my big mouth—”

“Jesus, for fuck’s sake, don’t be sorry.”

“It wasn’t my intention to ruin your evening.”

“You didn’t. Tate’s an asshole, always has been. Punching him should rank among the highlights of my evening.” He looked at her sideways, feeling a bit victorious when he caught her grinning, maybe even blushing. “Playing hooky with you isn’t half bad, either.”

The garden, at least, was real; as real as anything which would never occur in nature could be considered such, filled with a schizophrenic assemblage of non-native cultivars, selected and arranged on the basis of an impulsive and purely aesthetic sensibility. The horticulturists had been perplexed by his demands, alternately impressed and annoyed. His tastes were unconventional. The vision he’d had in mind was fully formed and inalienable. He was as certain of it as he was the scenes and settings of his mind’s eye as a child, imagining the secret hideaways and magnificent vistas that were so often described in literature. The garden was a demonic hybrid and platonic ideal. It was Hafiz and Bronte, Shakespeare and Woolf.

He hadn’t been here in a long time. Constructing it had been a task next to nothing, a pinprick of a funding stream compared to running the most ambitious data mining operation in human history, but he’d neglected it in recent years, ashamed by his own conceit. It was almost as indefensibly frivolous as bringing Dolores Abernathy to the company holiday party.

It was overgrown and tangled now, not beyond salvaging, but a sorry state to witness given its former grandeur. The pond, still as glass, decorated with a lattice of lily pads as thick as mold. The willow tree bent over it as if in lamentation.

“I prefer a sight like this to a palace, myself,” Dolores admitted.

“Me too. It could use a bit of work, though. A little attention might make it halfway presentable. I got distracted over the years.”

“I like it just the way it is. I think it’s beautiful.”

“Yeah, well, we made it that way.” His eyes glanced her furtively up and down. There was a mournfulness to the observation that he couldn’t place. “We made everything that way.”

“Did you bring me here just to tease me with it? I would love to paint a scene like this. It has a melancholy symmetry. Muddled sky over muddled water. Been staring at it like I could memorize it, if I tried hard enough.”

“Doesn’t work like that.”

She looked at him with a strangely pointed edge. “Doesn’t it, though? I might not _remember_ , not like a photograph or—or a passage in a book you can come back to, but that’s not the only trace a dream leaves behind, is it?”

He stared at her, brow sternly furrowed, eyes flicking over her face. Some of her hair had come loose from dashing through the brush and fell around her cheeks.

“I could wake up with a certain… feeling, and feeling is more valuable than any reference or technical skill. It’s like you said to me on our way here, on the train. What if I get up tomorrow with some kind of spark of inspiration unlike anything else I’ve ever had before? Maybe I won’t paint a pond, or a tree, or anything remotely of the sort, but… maybe whatever finds its way on that canvas will share the same soul nonetheless. Or a part of it.”

The Man in Black shrugged, unexpectedly speechless. No use grinding out a few harmless embers of hope. His own were long since ashes on the wind. There was something almost charming about Dolores’s indefatigable optimism.

Dolores breathed a sound of amusement. “Bet I’ll produce a fine portrait of a man who doesn’t look a thing like you, except he’s got that same expression of yours on his face.”

“What expression?” he said, too quickly.

“When you don’t know what to say, so your eyebrows knit a little closer together. And then you squint, just a fraction, almost like you’re looking for the words. There, you’re doing it again now!”

“Got me all figured out, haven’t you.”

“Not even the half of it. You’re thoroughly guarded, William. But I’ve got a trained eye.” Her tone grew slyly purposeful. “And you might say I had a certain feeling about you.”

“Is that why you agreed to come with me?”

“When you said we were old friends, I didn’t believe it at first. A man I knew only in dreams, showing up just to spirit me away for a night, referencing a whole history I couldn’t even remember?” She shook her head, reeling from the idea. “You have to admit, it’s a fantastical notion. And besides, you strike me as a difficult man to forget.”

He snorted.

“But I had this sense that you were right. I felt it. Not like déjà vu, or the remnants of a forgotten dream, but an invisible thread, tugging at me, tying us together somehow.”

The Man in Black took one last, long pull off the cigarette in lieu of comment. He flicked it into the pond, and the little orange flare blinked out in an instant on the surface of the water, sending out a few pitiful ripples. The sight and motion dredged up a memory, his mother delegating pennies at the park fountain when he was a boy. _Make a wish_ , she’d say.

It wasn’t the principle he’d been skeptical over, so much as the idea that wishes could be bought for so modest a price. He snickered to himself.

“I guarded myself too well, as luck would have it. Locked myself away as best I could. This is a liminal space, or else it was supposed to be. I spent more time in this garden, in that fucking hellish palace back there, than I had ever planned for. I underestimated what your world would do to me. I stayed here when I wasn’t ready.”

Dolores stepped closer to him, questioning. The Man in Black felt something coming loose within him, probably his better judgment, like stitches popping open one by one. She had that effect on him. He brought it upon himself.

“Ready for what?” she said, devastatingly soft.

“To go back. To the world I knew I didn’t belong in, the family who couldn’t have understood me. I found excuses to drag my feet, idle here in purgatory, sometimes for weeks. At first I thought I was afraid I’d bring something back, that some miasma from the Park would follow me home, like the stench of death, and they’d catch wind of it and the jig would be up, just like that. That I’d manage to put them in danger without even knowing it.”

“The Park?”

“It’s what we call your world. And you can’t stay, not as long as you’d like. Not for all the riches in the world, and never forever. There are rules. So I did the next best thing. I lingered at its gates.”

He stole a look at her, his ghost in the blue dress, haunting him past and present. She would continue to do so, he was sure, for what dismal shreds remained of his future.

“It was worse than that, of course,” he said, after several moments spent ruminating. “I wasn’t trying to protect them. The truth was that I didn’t want to go back and face them. I tried to do the right thing, undo my mistakes, but it wasn’t enough. So here I am again. And here we are. Running away, just like old times.”

“I’m not running,” Dolores said resolutely, taking both his hands in hers.

“No, you’re right, it was an unfair characterization. _You_ weren’t fleeing, running away _from_ anything. You were barreling straight on into the unknown, uncharted.” He paused, chewed the inside of his cheek through a wince. “You used to say you heard a voice calling you. Telling you that—”

He trailed off. Dolores tugged gently at his fingers.

“And you came with me.”

“Indeed I did. You brought me along for a hell of a ride.”

“Where did we go? Where did I take you?”

“In a big fucking circle,” he sputtered through a laugh.

Dolores held him in her gaze, sorrowfully perplexed, like he’d just fed her some bizarre and tragic riddle she couldn’t answer. He knew the feeling.

“Don’t you dare look at me like that,” he warned, and gave himself away by brushing a piece of hair behind her ear as he said it. “I told you not to be sorry. I mean it. That goes for everything tonight. I am hereby banishing all woebegone bullshit from the remainder of the evening, and you and I are going to make the most of it until sunrise. Is that a deal?”

She leaned into the touch of his hand, wrenching his heart violently up into his throat. Her mouth piqued into a tentative smile again.

“That depends. Do I get to do some more wandering?”

He sighed benevolently. “I yield to you the reins, Dolores. Lead the way.”

He watched her teeth catch on her lower lip. It was one of those striking little details that could swallow you whole if you were careless. There were foolish impulses that 35 years of hard-earned wisdom couldn’t erase, and the urge to seize her and kiss her breathless was one of them.

He rode it out with a stony, unruffled smile, jaw set firm while Dolores beamed at him, which hurt like staring into the sun. She took one last gander at the water, brought her hands to cup his face for just a moment, and then darted off, back toward the mouth of the garden trail.

The Man in Black breathed slowly, clenching his fists like grasping at something unseen, and then splaying the fingers out to remind himself they were empty.

Dolores’s shoes were left abandoned by the bench. He crouched to pick one up and turn it over in his hand, testing the weight of it, then dropped it back in the grass.

He reached over, sweeping the dust of fallen leaves and windblown soil off the stone platform of the bench, revealing a fragment of the poem engraved beneath. It was the last line of a stanza, glaring up from under a gritty smear.

_NO NAME SHALL BUT YOUR OWN BE FOUND_

He nodded appreciatively. “Rub it in, Marvell.”

Dolores was calling for him, waiting for him. He heard her voice and knew what she was saying even though he couldn’t make out the words.

The Man in Black rose to his feet and went to follow her into the night.

He did not look back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more episode! One more chapter! AAAGGGHHH!
> 
> Thanks for your patience, and thank you, as always, for reading.


	5. THE GATES

The Man in Black’s hand throbbed, but his head was alight.

As he exited the garden, he found himself possessed by an unnatural calm, and seduced by the notion that he was on his way to uncovering a new and dizzying clarity of purpose. It would not be outside the realm of literary symbolism, after all. One enters a garden and comes away with some type of knowledge, however half-formed. How often it was, by its very nature, terrifying and liberating in equal measure.

Never had he sought to purge himself of sin. Only to study its purpose within him: the spaces it occupied, which strings it pulled. Besides, it was vanity to believe that some fantasy of God would absolve you of your deeds; that any such God would examine the whole of your mediocre, self-aggrandizing existence and reward you with anything but the cosmic sheen of his spit on your grave.

In other words, the stain was permanent. But if you could understand a thing, you could control it. It was the best he could hope for, a small morsel of self-respect. To sin with deliberation.

Dolores weaved ahead of him, back into the courtyard. In one hand she clutched a haphazard bouquet of wildflowers, lilac and white, splashes of red that seemed black as arterial blood in the darkness.

It occurred to him that if knowledge was sin, and freedom its engine, then Dolores, shackled by blissful ignorance to the Park’s compulsory torture wheel, was as pure as the driven snow. And yet by virtue of her condition, she would never die; never come face to face with her creators in judgment – creators who were, by virtue of their own condition, spectacularly unsuited to render it.

The realization was so perversely funny to him that he began to laugh. Dolores tossed a look over her shoulder.

“What is it?”

“Just a thought.”

“Tell me.”

“It was nothing. How much more wandering are you up for?”

Dolores hummed a long, pensive note. He could sense her smiling beneath it. She extended her hand behind her, beckoning.

The Man in Black reached out to grasp it, and came to walk in step by her side. Their strides aligned in the blue-green grass, the dress splashing like water around her ankles.

“That part of your palace, over there,” she said, nodding up ahead toward the southern wing of the hotel. “The tower that looks like a fortress. What’s inside it?”

The Man in Black swallowed. “Not much, at the moment. That part of the building is kind of like a waystation. Visitors to the Park spend a bit of time there, before they revert back to life in my world.”

“Like your garden, then.”

“In a way. It’s closed right now, though.”

“Does that mean we can’t see inside? I thought you had the keys to the kingdom.”

“No, I can show you.” He attempted an easy shrug. “If that’s what you want.”

“You are a most gracious host, William,” she said, swinging their hands together.

The Man in Black made a noise of grim acknowledgment.

Obediently, he veered them off toward the southern wing, its stark white edifice shooting up from the grounds like the face of a cliff, like a strangely beautiful prison wall. It was patterned all over with the black gleam of the hotel suites’ floor-to-ceiling windows, massive tinted panels that gazed out and revealed nothing within. At higher stories, some were bounded by the geometric underbite of terraces.

A marble walkway led them from the sea of lawn to the building’s mezzanine. It was enshrined in the same foreboding half-light as the Park premises. The Man in Black shot a glance back behind him, at the main hall and its warmly glowing ballroom as it dwindled in the distance. His instinctive sense of time had left him. He imagined the saccharine music fading, replaced by the hollow, clattering sounds of a celebration as it was folded and cleared away. DELOS staff, rosy-drunk and stupid, retreating to their rooms above.

Another pinprick of a camera greeted them, above a set of sliding glass doors as wide as a freeway. It moved to inspect the Man in Black, and the doors opened, the lights inside breathing brighter.

“It really is a fortress,” observed Dolores, in hushed astonishment. “It looks almost like the place you brought me from. Before we came here, on the train.”

She was not so far off the mark. The Man in Black’s gaze drifted up, to the watchful, unblinking eye.

“Yes,” he agreed, his voice low and distant. “Some remarkable similarities, aren’t there?”

He led Dolores inside. There were more reception desks, orbited by clusters of empty chairs, flanked on one side by a row of elevators, on the other by gaping hallways that branched off out of sight. Escalators slanted up toward a second level of the mezzanine, their pathways fading up into gray, like ramps to a world perched on a layer of storm clouds.

Automatically, Dolores squeezed his hand, and he was not quick enough to clamp down on the resulting wince.

“Oh, I’m sorry. William, I nearly forgot.” She turned in toward him, tracing her thumb apologetically over the bruise. “How is it?”

The Man in Black breathed carefully out through his nose, still disjointed by the presence of her so close to him. The space around them, by extension, seemed to blow out into sudden infinity.

“It’s fine,” he said.

Her mouth turned, a little cheeky. It was extremely distracting.

“You know, when my daddy taught me how to throw a punch, he cautioned me to aim for the softer parts.”

The Man in Black raised an eyebrow. “Peter Abernathy taught you to throw a punch?”

“You know him?” Dolores’s eyes sparked bright. “You met my father?”

He sighed, acquiescent, and glanced away. Dolores tilted her face up and under, searching his again, deviously expectant.

“And he didn’t try and chase you off the ranch, shotgun blazing? He must have liked you. Color me impressed. He doesn’t like most of the boys who come calling.”

“Well, I’m no boy, now, am I?”

“No, I suppose not.” Her smile grew gleeful and wild, then relaxed into something curious, impenetrable. She stared at him a moment, then straightened, craning her head back up to their surroundings. A fine line drew across her forehead.

“What is it?”

“That smell,” she said. “Can you smell it, too? It’s not like anything I’ve ever— maybe the closest thing is turpentine, but that’s not it, either.”

The Man in Black’s nostrils flared. Faintly, he caught the harsh, chemical scent. It was one of the rare, nostalgic fossils of his youth that had persisted, unchanged, as the world careened forward into an optimized, unobtrusive, and odorless future.

“Chlorine,” he said.

“There’s a hospital in here?”

The Man in Black stifled a laugh.

“What, why is that so amusing?”

“No, Dolores. There’s a pool. Up there. For the guests.”

“A pool,” she repeated, like the idea was insane, stupid, or both.

“The marvels of modern chemistry. Though I guess you could say it isn’t so modern anymore. Pretty antiquated, actually. But if it ain’t broke…”

He was mysteriously charmed by this. Dolores had found the lake in his garden, and now, the pool in his prison. It was a pleasant bit of symmetry. He thought about symbolism again, of purity, and cleansing.

“Come on,” he said, with an insouciant kind of cheer, a little offbeat. “You’ll see.”

He started for the escalators, with Dolores padding eagerly behind. As they approached, it sprang to life, animated by a strobe of white light up through the banisters.

Dolores gasped, and paused, and he took her hand again.

“Don’t worry,” he reassured. “It’s just like the other one. Careful, watch your feet.”

He guided her delicately aboard, lifting the hem of the dress above her ankles, away from the rows of mechanical teeth. There was something quietly electrifying about that, the sensation of grasping at fabric over her thigh.

She grinned at him, a bit coy, and steadied herself as they ascended by clutching at his shirt underneath his suit jacket, in the spot just above his hip.

The Man in Black turned his head away, stared back up and ahead of them. It was the only thing he could do to cope.

They reached the second landing, and he led the way past a café sitting in lifeless shadow, its sterile white tables and chairs in perfectly staggered configurations. Masses of fake cacti and other succulents were arranged, artfully, around a handsome coffee bar. In the dark, they looked more like stalagmites in a cave.

Then, down another cavernous hall, tiles on the floor flickering gently awake. The wall at the Man in Black’s left blazed suddenly white, and then orange, like hellfire. It was as if the house lights had been thrown on inside a theater, jarring them both to a stop.

The wall was a mural, a screen, blank at first, and then anointed with the Park’s striking, unforgettable vista, racing out ahead in blistering 16K.

Dolores stared at it, bathed in the reddish glow of an LED desert.

LIVE WITHOUT LIMITS, the screen declared in bold-faced text, followed by, REBOOT IN LUXURY. An overlay arranged itself into a helpful directory, including a tiered diagram of amenities and services, and corresponding locations on an interactive map. A section of it blinked helpfully. YOU ARE HERE, it reminded them.

“It’s my world,” said Dolores, entranced. “And pieces of yours.”

“They should have turned this fucking part off,” grumbled the Man in Black.

Dolores drifted toward the screen. Instinctively, she reached out to touch it, and was interrupted by the life-size image of a woman dressed in white, unnervingly beautiful, coalescing into view.

“Welcome to the DELOS Resort and Spa, where your fantasies continue,” said the woman, all statuesque poise and satin intonation. “We pride ourselves on a seamless, sumptuous transition home, and a world class getaway all its own. How might I assist you on your journey?”

“Do I know you from somewhere?” asked Dolores, as if the sight of a talking hologram was only slightly less interesting than the possibility of a familiar face.

The Man in Black recognized her just fine. It brought up a sour taste.

“You can go back to the hole you crawled out of,” he deadpanned.

Dolores flashed him a reproachful look. “She’s only trying to help.”

“When Mephistopheles came to Dr. Faust, he was only trying to help.”

The woman offered a polite and chillingly indulgent smile. “Should you change your mind, I’m always here.”

“Always watching,” sneered the Man in Black.

The woman dissolved, as if into the structure of the cliffs behind her. The image of the Park lingered for several seconds longer. Then, the DELOS Destinations logo blinked once, before the screen became a wall once more.

“Let’s keep going,” he told Dolores. “The place we’re headed is just down the corridor.”

“I know. I saw it on the map, right next to the atrium.”

“Very attentive.”

“Like I said. Trained eye.”

“What else did you see?”

“Nothing that would have spoiled any surprise, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I was just curious,” he said honestly.

Dolores sighed, turning her attention down to the flowers in her fist, like she’d forgotten she still had them. They were already starting to wrinkle, curl inward on themselves.

“There is so much, I can barely take it all in. More than I could ever hope to see in one night. And this is just one small part of it – one scant little room in a mansion teeming with halls full of doors, stretching out all around us, begging to be opened.”

The Man in Black nodded, almost sympathetically. 

“I only wish we had more time,” she said.

She did not need to be coaxed again. With a final skim of her fingers over the blank face of the wall, Dolores pivoted neatly on her heel, and did not spare so much as a glance behind as she continued down the hall, back into the darkness that peeled itself away to meet her path, like flesh pulling back along a skeleton of light.

He followed. Soon the hallway opened up into another great expanse which blinked itself partially into view. There was another garden, this one sectioned off by sheets of glass, and bounded overhead by rafters so tall that the trees inside couldn’t have dreamed to reach them.

Across from the atrium, as promised, was the pool, recessed inside a sheet of piebald marble that slanted gently down, from the shallow end which faced them to a depth of twenty feet. It was likewise circumscribed by glass, as thick as plates of armor.

The chlorine smell was enveloping now, cloying as perfume. The Man in Black took a deep breath. Scent, with its inextricable lockjaw grip on memory. He recalled lazy summers, baked white concrete, radiating under his feet. The neighborhood kids, his occasional tormentors during the school year, tanned and tamed by long days spent under the sun. They wrestled with one another on each other’s shoulders. The Man in Black couldn’t swim, so instead, he watched.

When they figured that out, which was inevitable, they threw him in, kicking and screaming. He ought to have seen that coming. So he learned the hard way, with flailing limbs and burning gulps of Crayola-colored water. By the time the stoned teenage lifeguard pulled him out, he was throwing most of it up on the recliners and the tops of his waterlogged sneakers.

Once he finished his retching, he had folded up the recliner and exacted his clumsy but effective revenge on the closest one he could nail with a well-aimed swing.

They did not let him come back to the recreation center after that. It worked out, eventually. The Man in Black had built more than a few of his own by now – or something reminiscent, at any rate.

Dolores raced up to the glass, palms against the door for a moment, and tried the handle. It didn’t budge. She tugged again, to no avail.

“Allow me,” said the Man in Black. Emboldened, he came up close beside her, and folded his hand over hers.

Dolores examined him up and down, with a slow-brimming smile that implied she was surprised by this, though not unhappily so. He edged her thumb aside with his, so the pad of it could make contact with the surface of the handle. There was the sound of a biometric lock, a whisper and a click.

He was close enough to see the gooseflesh rising on her shoulder, downy hairs on the back of her neck, pricking to attention.

Wasn’t that something.

Dolores understood the effects of this kind of magic by now, the shape of the rules that governed this dream world, if not the underlying mechanics. It was a kingdom that lived and breathed, pulsed and yielded with the rhythms of its keeper. Locks and keys had shuffled off their physical forms, transcended into a realm where objects distilled themselves to function. Confidently, she pulled once more, slinking through the slit of the doorway. There was a cool rush of air like a synthetic ocean breeze, and the Man in Black squeezed through after her.

“A public bath in a cage of glass,” she said. Across the water, which gave off the low drone of filters humming within its depths, the sound of her voice shuddered back an echo. “I’ve read about these, in the eastern cities. Though I’m sure they don’t look quite like this.”

“We are very, very far east.”

“Then you have outbreaks here, like they do? Cholera? The doctor says all the people coming out west and turning up in towns like ours are looking for one of two things. Either fortune or fresh air. The coal and the filth makes them sick, turns their lungs black as the insides of a chimney flue.”

“No one gets sick here,” said the Man in Black. “Not anymore. Not like that.”

“What’s that even mean, ‘not anymore?’”

“Illness, infirmity, disease. They’re relics now, artifacts of a natural history from which we have strayed an unimaginable distance. We burned them out of existence, with science and its cleansing fire, and the fuel of private enterprise. Or we bred them out. Didn’t even leave so much as a pile of ashes to show for the effort.” He chuckled brusquely, and felt Dolores’s eyes on him, widening. “We got rid of the coal, too. Whatever burns these days, we make sure it burns clean.”

The filth that remained was invisible to the naked eye. It accumulated nonetheless, in places where it could not be swept or scoured away, or rinsed off with pungent antiseptics.

“People still get old,” he added, “and they still die, which is that last, mortifying tether to our basic humanity, and what measly scraps remain of our humility. But that is the one problem we have yet to solve.”

He turned his gaze to hers, almost regretful that she could not have understood the reason for its purposefulness. Dolores shook her head, as if to shake off the overwhelmingness of this disclosure, and went to stand by the lip of the pool, stare down into its surface.

“You don’t believe me?” he said.

“No, I do.” She crouched down, pulling the dress up, arms folded over her knees with the wilting bouquet of flowers dangling at one elbow. She might have been looking for something in the water itself, or observing her own reflection. “I just don’t know if it’s a problem that needs solving. I’m not sure it’s a problem at all. Needless pain and suffering, that’s one thing – that I understand getting rid of. But death? Death is… it’s a fact of life.”

“Death can be painful. And it causes a great deal of suffering. Not least of which to those it leaves behind.”

“Yes. But it comes for all of us, sooner or later. Don’t you believe in God, William?”

“Do you?”

That earned him a playful glance. “I asked you first.”

“No,” he said, after a length of time spent debating the merits of an explanation, and deciding it was better not to bother. “I don’t.”

He waited for some kind of reaction to that, what he anticipated might be a lazy reprimand, an interrogation. The more civilized and law-abiding residents of Sweetwater were, by and large, the church-going, God-fearing types. There was reason to believe the Abernathies had been written the same way.

“I’m not sure I do, either,” Dolores said finally, which was pleasantly unexpected, and then she laughed through a sigh, which was all the more pleasant still. “Now look, you’ve got me blaspheming so close to Christmas. I’m sure that bodes well for my immortal soul.”

“Never too late to repent,” he consoled, characteristically restrained, but not without an undercurrent of glee.

She dashed him a grin. The Man in Black came up beside her, and slowly arranged himself in complement to her position. He perched over the pool with her, his arms balanced on the points of his knees, slim gargoyle in a fine suit.

His eyes wandered over her. Not much he could do to help it, and they had passed the point of abiding decorum for its own sake. Now they were choosing to steal away, slinking through dark gardens and hidden hallways in gilded prisons, speaking frankly of death and God.

And if he could be frank with himself, he enjoyed the way she was looking at him. It was a way that suggested she knew, that she had been right all along, and that the Man in Black was doomed – despite all better knowledge, his careful preparations and contingency plans – to be the misbehaving sort. There was that saying about old habits.

The dress was bunched up high against the flesh of her thigh, under the poised dovetail of her limbs. She hugged her knees to her chest. He caught himself dwelling on the sight, in a way that bordered on impropriety, but Dolores didn’t seem to mind. In fact, she kept smiling at him, somehow managing to look both self-effacing by it and terrifyingly astute.

She made a noise like something telling had occurred to her.

“What is it?” The Man in Black half-spoke, half-murmured, with the tenor of his voice huskier than it had been before.

She tilted in his direction, bending her head into her shoulder, obscuring her face a little. “Oh, just a _thought_.”

“Please.” He stared down at her. There was a bit of frayed petal in her hair, which he banished the urge to pluck away.

Her eyes switched back and forth over him, a blue clock’s pendulum. “Promise you’ll tell me yours, then. Tell me what I’ve been waiting so patiently to hear. What it is about you and me.”

He squeezed his own shut tight, took a breath before opening them again. “Dolores, I could start at the beginning and regale you with every last detail. It wouldn’t make sense. Like so much of this place, there’s too much you wouldn’t understand it. And there isn’t enough—”

“—Time?”

“You want me to narrate thirty-five years in a single night.”

“What? Thirty-five years, how is that even possible? I haven’t been alive for—”

“I told you, you wouldn’t understand.”

“Some of it, I would!” She was insistent now, pleading. “I’d have to. You can tell me the parts I _would_ understand. Certain things are universal. Aren’t they? Even in a world built from dreams. Even in this palace of smoke and mirrors, without sickness or disease or God, there’s still… gardens full of flowers, and music and dancing, and… Charles Dickens! We share Charles Dickens. For heaven’s sake, William, that’s got to count for something.”

The Man in Black laughed in spite of a fondly remembered pain, drudging itself up from the grave he had dug for it long ago. Or maybe he laughed because of it.

“Yeah. It does.” It was his turn to sigh. “Ebenezer Scrooge did traverse a whole lifetime in a night. Past, present, future.”

“I’m but humbly asking for one out of three. And no sudden conversion to pious, Christmas spirit, either.”

“Two, actually. The past, as you’re requesting it, is necessarily entangled with your perception of the present.”

“ _Zero_. Zero out of three, if you’re sending me off in the morning with nothing to remember you by. Can’t keep what I can’t grab hold of to begin with.”

He didn’t think she intended that to stick the way it did, like a barb between his ribs, but he felt it nonetheless. The Man in Black smiled lamely at her in defeat.

“No,” he relented. “No, you’re absolutely right.”

“Then it’s a deal?”

“You are going to be the death of me.” He swung the hand that didn’t hurt out across his chest, offering it to her. “You were always the death of me.”

“Not if you find your way out of it, right?” They shook, and Dolores beamed at him, victorious. “I’ll bet you’re well on your way to solving that problem, if what I’ve seen of your world is any indication.”

She held on to his hand, musing for several moments, before turning it over, palm-side up, and replacing her own with the ailing bouquet of flowers. They were hanging, limp, like corpses. She folded his fingers around them.

The Man in Black looked at her quizzically. “What’s this for?”

“For you. So _you_ don’t forget tonight.”

“In a thousand years, I would not forget tonight. These flowers will be dead by dawn if they’re lucky.”

“A thousand years, thirty-five. One night. Oh, William. Don’t be so literal. It’s not as if I expect the same from you.” When he continued to stare in confusion, silently hypnotized, and almost certainly with that helpless expression she’d called him out on earlier, she drew a hand down the angled hollow of his cheek, over and against his mouth. Lingered for a pointed moment with her thumb pressed to his lip, which sent a darkly thrilling shockwave to the bottom of his stomach, and let her arm drop down. “We’ve set a different precedent, haven’t we? What was it that you said to me, when you first came calling. ‘Better to show than tell’?”

“I don’t follow, Dolores.”

She glanced away, considering it. Shook off what might have been the remains of some embarrassment, as if amused at her own foolishness. Then she turned back to him, a little bolder this time.

“You want to hear something funny? You want to hear what I was really thinking about, when you asked me?”

“Of course I do. That is, in fact, why I asked you.”

“You can’t laugh.”

“I won’t.”

“You do have a tendency to do that, you know. I am aware it isn’t mean-spirited, but you seem to find me very unexpectedly—"

“You did just say it was funny.”

“—I _know_ , I know.”

“I’m not laughing _at_ you. I wouldn’t do that. And it isn’t something I do much of these days. You should take some pride in prying it out of me.”

Dolores gave him a sorry look, and the Man in Black recalled what Hale had said back in the ballroom, that certain unauthorized chapters of his story had already been brought to light, whether he liked it or not.

“We agreed no woebegone bullshit,” he reminded her.

“No bullshit,” she promised.

They spent some unmarked length of time that way, their eyes joined, Dolores with her small, soft hands still cupping his around the flower stems. The Man in Black’s were brutish by comparison, large and lined and thoroughly calloused, scuffed by reins and gunmetal, hashed with stubborn scars that wouldn’t fade. Old wounds, and now new ones, like the flat of his knuckles, christened with the colors of bone hitting bone. They were bordered by the more mundane disfigurements of a lifetime spent picking at his nail beds.

He wished his hands were closed around her waist, instead.

“It was my first thought, when I saw you. When you came for me.” Dolores bowed her head, looking down at their hands, but he could see her smiling, dreamily over the words as she spoke. She traced her fingertips slowly down the ridges of his fist, against the taut tendon of his wrist, the pulse that thrummed beneath the skin. “How could I not suspect it? A man dressed in black comes to me… he comes to me in dreams, alone, in a dark room. The way he walks through the darkness, it’s as if he owns it. Lives inside of it.”

The Man in Black didn’t fully understand yet, but his head was alight again, gears turning, brimming with something. Whatever it was, it beckoned to him, elusive, from the recesses of his consciousness.

“It would have made perfect sense,” Dolores continued, haltingly suggestive. Each sentence like a card laid out, one by one. “You greeted me like an old friend. Asked for my trust. Told me you could take me away. That you desired my company—"

“A dangerously persistent desire, I’m learning to admit.”

His eyes upon her had gone black as stones, gleaming in the light skipping off the surface of the pool, and volcanic underneath. Crackling with the combustion of longing and lust and blistering curiosity.

Dolores released a breath of a laugh, shaking her head again.

“I wasn’t even afraid. Isn’t that strange? I thought I would be. You’d think his arrival would frighten even the most devout. And I hadn’t gotten so much as a warning, not a chance to plead my case.”

It was creeping up into him now, the slow burn of realization. What Dolores had thought he was, however briefly. What the thing inside him was. That thing which swelled and burned and brimmed, overflowing him, as water gushing over a porcelain rim and blood from a beating heart. The stain, racing and rippling outward, like concentric circles in a fountain. Just a drop of it. A drop at first. A blemish, no bigger than a penny peddled for a wish; dose of poison as ordinary as a cigarette and as thoughtlessly tasted, tossed away on the surface of a pond.

 _Inspiration_. A feral grin split his face, uncomfortable Cheshire cat sort of intensity, and he knew instantly that his appearance was monstrous for it. He turned away, folded it into the arch of his shoulder, until he could contain himself, wipe it away.

Dolores felt him move, snapped her face back up to his, but she was only feigning at being aghast. “You said you wouldn’t laugh!”

The Man in Black shook with it anyway, silently into his sleeve, so much was he overcome by delight. As he labored to compose himself, Dolores succumbed to the inertia herself, giggling as she shoved him. It was not much of a shove, but the Man in Black was precariously balanced on the balls of his feet, unsteady in his elation. He let himself teeter backward, broke his descent as gracefully as he could manage through his throes, which wasn’t very. He unraveled, rolled back against the cold floor, knees bent and feet still planted flat by the edge of the pool. He held the flowers against his chest, and kept laughing. Laughing and grinning up at the empty, unlit ceiling.

Dolores exclaimed in surprise, and said his name, the shape of it somewhere between mock-admonishment and apology. She scrambled to his side on her hands and knees, hovered above him. She was grinning as wide as he was.

“Some grim reaper I must be,” he said, after he had gathered himself, looking up at her. “Going down that easy. Just a nudge from a beautiful young woman, that’s all it takes.”

“ _And_ he neglected to collect his toll! What a damning oversight. See, _that_ was me trying to be funny. What’s the price to ferry me across, anyway? A couple of gold coins? Isn’t that how the story goes?”

“Don’t sell yourself short, Sweetheart. I’d pay a fortune for you.” He thought about that, grunted one last punctuating laugh, bittersweet on his tongue. “Already fucking have.”

He watched her smile flicker sweetly, go from fiery to gentle. She tucked a piece of hair behind her ear, dusted something off the Man in Black’s lapel that the garden must have left behind. He tried for a bit of levity.

“We could just stay like this for the rest of the night, you know. I don’t mind the view.”

Dolores rolled her eyes, good-naturedly teasing, the pink of her cheeks deepening. “Who knew Death was such a flirt.”

“You’ll have to forgive me. I’m out of practice. And were that it indeed my vocation. Acting custodian of the departed, that is. Not flirting.”

“Could have fooled me. You have a natural talent.”

“Alas, I am but a modest ‘architect,’ as you so cleverly put it. My powers are limited. Got plenty of time under my belt as a creator of worlds. Can’t say for sure that I’d be any good as a destroyer.” He cocked his eyebrows thoughtfully. “But I did like the concept. I liked it very much.”

“I think it probably takes a whole lot less to knock something down than it does to build it in the first place.”

“I don’t know about that. Ideas have their own momentum, self-perpetuating. Get them up to speed and that’s it, there’s your magic blueprint for civilization.”

“Yours or mine?”

“There’s a reason technology moves in one direction, and it sure as hell isn’t backwards. But ideas are also easy to derail. Unwieldy.” He gestured with his hand, tilted it back and forth. “The good ones even more so. Sometimes they start out good, and shit happens, and they go bad. Real bad. And there’s no stuffing them back into Pandora’s box once they’re out there. You have any idea how easy it is to take something and run with it, run straight off the edge of a cliff?”

“Sounds like you have some experience after all.”

“I’ve been known to get carried away.”

“And how about now? Is that what’s happening here?”

“Maybe. I’ve been giving it very serious consideration.”

“You can always blame me for leading you astray.”

“Believe me, I will.”

Dolores swatted his arm and rolled away, on to her stomach, stretching out next to him, facing the pool once more with her chin in her hands. The Man in Black propped himself up on his elbows. She kicked a foot up, slowly, idly by his shoulder. There was something in the image of it that moved him, bare and blackened with dirt.

She was quiet again for a while. The Man in Black contented himself with the sight of her, not giving much thought to whether she could feel him staring.

“Is it because you’re afraid I’ll go crazy?” she said finally.

The question took him aback, and he blinked. “What are you talking about?”

“You said that’s why they bring us in here empty. No memories, in or out. All these things about us – the things you’ve been so reluctant to tell me. What’s the worst that could happen? Is that it?”

The Man in Black rolled his head back, back at the ceiling. Searching for an answer to that in the rows of lamps, far off in their dark, socketed hollows.

“You won’t go crazy,” he said eventually, in the way that made it sound, intentionally or not, like he was the real liability there.

“It’s all right,” she replied. Just barely audible, over the dissonant buzz of the pool. “It wouldn’t be kind of me to force you. I know you’re not ready yet.”

He sat up stiffly. Looked back at her, as she spoke to the circulating water.

“That’s what I was trying say. When I said you didn’t need to be literal. Showing instead of telling. It’s not like I don’t know—…” she paused, coughed a bashful laugh into the back of her wrist. “It’s not like I don’t already know enough to work with.”

The Man in Black felt something that should have been relief, but it was heavy instead, a crushing portent.

“We shook on it,” he said, lowly. Levelly. “I owe you. What do I give you in return, then? What else is it you want me to show you?”

At last she looked back at him. Graced him with an expression that was nervous but unmistakeable in its intent. The Man in Black felt his breath lodge in his lungs, the small fire inside him flaring.

“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

The Man in Black pulled himself to his feet. Dusted off the flat of his trousers, and gave a straightening tug to the suit jacket. He tucked the flowers under his arm, and followed with an absent, ritualistic twist of each of his cuff links, even though they didn’t need tightening.

His reflection in the pool was distorted and hardly human, an elongated outline that shimmered with the vibrations of the water.

He smiled faintly to himself. It was a good concept, quite promising, and worth exploring. He would attend to it, when the time came round once more. It would be many months from now, when the stars resumed their rightful place in the sky, and the lights in this place burned bright again, its cells filled with feckless prisoners. Sinners who only sinned out of brainless habit and basal intoxication, pitiful and formulaic half-wits who only ever dared if granted permission, assured pre-emptive absolution. They could not imagine what it would mean, if it could indeed mean anything at all. Its meaninglessness was what consoled them.

For now, there were other sins to attend to. They would be of little consolation to him, not in the end, but Dolores had granted him her own kind of permission, and besides, it was very nearly Christmas, after all. A shame to spend it alone.

Dolores went to dip her hand in the pool, experimentally. The Man in Black’s reflection warped under it. She gasped immediately and pulled it back, sat upright.

“Good God, it’s freezing!”

“Heat’s not on,” said the Man in Black. He held his hand down to her, and Dolores wiped it on her dress before taking it, letting him help her up. “Come to think of it, I may have an idea. I’ve been inspired.”

“Is it a good one?”

The question was innocent enough, but there was an undeniable mischief lurking underneath.

The Man in Black looked down at her. His expression hinted at a conniving smirk, but when he spoke, it was with genuine and unaffected warmth, betraying of a longstanding ardor that even he couldn’t convincingly fake.

“It’ll start out that way,” he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long, and sorry I lied! It's actually _not_ the end! One more chapter! But I promise I'm getting there. This scene wound up being much longer than I anticipated, and what I thought would be a quick, transitional bit of groundwork turned into... this. I got caught up with them talking to one another. I like it this way, though. A cathartic end is near. And I promise it will be ready before actual Christmas.


	6. THE END OF IT

_"Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead[.]"_

-Charles Dickens, _A Christmas Carol_

*

The single elevator that granted access to the uppermost floors of the resort’s central tower was hidden in plain sight, behind a dark and unassuming door with an old-fashioned panic bar, at the far end of an unassuming hallway.

It was what awaited if you stayed your course past an increasing concentration of storage rooms and administrative offices, all unequivocally engraved, and in ascending order of their emphasis to dissuade.

If you came upon the closets which admonished, in no uncertain terms, EMPLOYEES ONLY, and did not turn back in embarrassment of your error; if you took no heed of back-lit panels and blinking indicators that issued their warnings, speaking first in shades of white, and then shouting them in red; then at last you would be rewarded for your stubborn disregard, and come upon the sight of it: an inscrutable, indestructible sheet of metal, absent any indication as to its pathway or purpose, lacking any mark but for the vanishingly thin crack down its face, creating two halves of perfectly symmetric manufacture. The implication of an opening, and devoid of any invitation beyond it. An austere, forbidding prize, reserved for only the most intrepid of trespassers, or those who knew of its private destination.

It would be a dispiriting sight, and an anticlimactic end to your detour.  
  
It would be, if you were not the Man in Black and his most esteemed companion.

For to him, all barriers yielded, and the invisible machines, silently surveying behind their guardsman’s posts, bowed in subservience.

Dolores followed him into the elevator, escorted by a gentlemanly hand. The metal doors gave way to an interior of glass, or what would have read as such to the uninitiated. In truth, it was a transparent acetate that surrounded them in its narrow confines, overlooking a spectacular view of island’s western beach. At night, the scoured-white sand appeared a bright cobalt, and the ocean, which crept up to meet it, churning and abyssal black.

Dolores cupped her hands around her eyes and against the plastic for a better look. When the elevator began to glide up into the air, she startled, enough to send her crashing toward the Man in Black for refuge. He caught her in his embrace.

“You’re all right,” he said, grinning down while she clung to him. Her face was buried in his chest. “Hey, you’re all right.”

She peered up at him, and he felt the grin faltering, fading as their eyes met, held there, at provocatively close range. His eyes danced to and from her mouth.

“Little afraid of heights,” she said.

“Don’t look out there, then. Just look at me.”

“I am looking at you,” she said, with her arms around his waist.

They ascended into the air, and the sight of the beach over her shoulders fell away, shrinking beneath them.

The Man in Black’s palm settled between her shoulder blades, and the other at the point of her hip. It was impossible to tear his eyes away from her own, or to keep them from slipping intermittently, treacherously, to certain riveting specifics. The shape of her cupid’s bow, for instance, or the dimple that cleft the swell of her lower lip.

“Where are we going?” asked Dolores, sounding exquisitely languid herself, like the answer wouldn’t have mattered. “Where are you taking me that’s all the way up in the sky?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“If you tell me, I’ll still be surprised! I promise. I swear it.”

“And I told you it’s a secret.”

“It’s like Wonderland here. Curiouser and curiouser. I’ve come to expect the unexpected by now.”

“A drop of patience,” he chided, as much to himself. “You shall receive nothing less.”

At the highest reaches of the tower, the elevator braked seamlessly to a halt, announcing its arrival with a friendly chime. The doors slid apart in silence at his back, but the Man in Black could observe the grand reveal even as he faced away. The bright light flooded over his shoulders in its infinite ricochet paths, reflected by the curving shell of acetate.

Its golden warmth lit Dolores’s face. The Man in Black smiled with deep satisfaction as she extracted herself from his arms, emerging in slow increments, drawn out by wonderment.

He watched her as she disembarked, into the handsome and sprawling penthouse lair. He let her hover in the foyer for a while before he joined her, his hands replaced in his trouser pockets again.

The elevator doors slipped closed behind him as he walked.

“I thought you said you didn’t live here,” she said, when he had come to take his place at her side. Her voice was thready from exhilaration.

“I don’t,” he said, with an offhand shrug.

Dolores turned her head to stare at him, up the sharp slope of his shoulder, and his face yielded a twitch of amusement. He knew how she was looking at him.

“William,” she said.

He bent his head and laughed noiselessly over his feet, just a few quick shakes behind a grin. Then, capitulating, he looked her straight back.

“Just another place I choose to linger,” he explained. “From time to time.”

He trailed her into the foyer, which cratered outward into a massive suite, fenced in by yet more plates of not-quite-glass that gazed out upon the water and the mainland’s blinking skyline. The modernist, open-concept layout wasn’t to his taste, but unlike his garden, this particular refuge had not been built to spec. The space had been colonized as a matter of necessity, hastily redecorated.

He had done what he could with it. To their right, the wall surrounding the fireplace had been hollowed out by shelves and was lined with books to bursting, fashioned into a makeshift reading room. The Man in Black found the faded, vintage spines infinitely more lively than their gleaming monochrome housing, an aesthetic which had become so ingrained in DELOS design as to verge on visual pathology. It was not for lack of imagination, but instead a clever psychological cue, the better to emphasize the dividing line between the world of the Park and the world to which you were sentenced to return.

Dolores browsed the book titles, lured in by the dull Technicolor rows. The Man in Black charted an opposite route for the kitchen. He noticed that he had been trailing a stream of withering petals and removed his cuff links and suit jacket, extracting the mummifying bouquet of wildflowers stuffed in an interior breast pocket. He threw the jacket over one of the dining room chairs, and the flowers on the table.

As always, he noted the absurdity of such a palatial dining arrangement, its overwhelming black table and its eight accompanying seats, none of which he could recall ever having moved. Who the hell would join him for dinner? Whom would he have bothered to invite?

“I see your appreciation for Dickens spans the breadth of his work,” Dolores observed. “And Shakespeare. Poe, Dostoevsky… William Blake and John Milton…”

The Man in Black stared at the flowers and eventually reconsidered. He undid his cuff links, rolled up his sleeves, and took the flowers to the kitchen counter.

“Only _Jane Eyre_?” she said, somewhat accusingly, as he elbowed on the faucet and went rummaging through a cupboard.

“What about _Jane Eyre_?”

“You’ve got an entire library of stodgy old men in here, and only one book by the Bronte sisters!”

The Man in Black laughed. There were only wine glasses, highball glasses, and coffee mugs within reach, so he filled one of the larger mugs from the tap and stuck the flowers in it. _Do I look like a fucking morning person_ , demanded the mug, in a kitschy typeface eroded from years of use. It was something his daughter would have gifted him as a joke, ages ago. It probably was.

With a deadpan flourish, he set the ridiculous display in full view atop the breakfast bar, where Dolores could see it. Ta-da.

Dolores must have forgiven his taste in literature. She was smiling, sly, with a hand cradling her elbow, knuckles pressed up against her lips and suppressing a laugh. He couldn’t tell if she was amused by the bouquet in the stupid mug, or what he assumed was the stupid look on his face, whatever it was she said he did when she’d caught him off guard. It was a talent for which she had a preternatural knack.

“It was the only one I liked,” he explained. “You in the mood for a nightcap? You want anything to drink?”

“Yes, I’d like that.”

“Haven’t got much of a selection, I’m afraid. There’s whiskey—uh, scotch, and maybe a decent red in the wine fridge. I can check.”

“Sweetwater has got enough whiskey to fill the Erie Canal,” said Dolores. “I’m sure the wine is lovely.”

The Man in Black nodded like he wasn’t so confident about that, but he was relieved for the opportunity to turn away, pull himself the fuck together. The wall adjacent to the bookshelves was adorned with ancient movie posters — actual specimens, for which he’d paid handsomely — all archived under glass. Dolores was posed in front of them, haloed by the classics: Leone, Peckinpah, Sturges. An illustrated Burt Lancaster hovered over her head, mid-stride and rifle in hand, as a waifish Audrey Hepburn clung to him and begged.

Dolores was looking at him, but not quite past him yet. What he wanted her to see lay behind him, in the square footage that stretched out of focus, where the kitchen footprint transitioned into a living area. If she squinted over the edges of the low-slung leather couches, under the gently sweeping arc of the stairwell that led to the upstairs bedrooms, it was sculpted into the vast, sheltered terrace that sprawled out from the windows and into the night, identifiable from the coruscating blue patterns that are specific to light as it dances off the surface of water.

The Man in Black pulled some proper crystal from the cupboard, and drew out the task of hunting for a drinkable vintage. He crouched patiently beside the kitchen island until he heard the telltale gasp of delight.

“There’s one up here, too!” Dolores exclaimed. “You built another one all the way up here for yourself!”

He smiled to himself, inspecting a 2041 Cabernet that would have to suffice.

“You’ll find that one more hospitable than the glacial pit downstairs,” he said.

“I can swim in it?”

“You can do whatever the hell you want.”

He retrieved the bottle by its neck, twisting the corkscrew down with slow relish. He hadn’t had a drink since the night Juliet died. In his world, he marketed himself a believable ascetic.

As he filled their glasses, his own with a heavy hand, he felt her moving past him, walking toward the pool. It was peripheral blur of motion, distant enough that it registered only belatedly as being somehow anomalous, demanding of his full attention. He turned in time to catch her strolling casually for the terrace and was rewarded with the receding view of her back, its slope of bare skin tinted warm under a hanging chandelier, uninterrupted by the dress.

She was wearing just the pair of black panties, black as the darkened soles of her feet.

The sight lodged in the Man in Black’s head like an ice pick. He blinked only once, but inside himself he felt some critical structure imploding, collapsing like a house of cards.

He assumed must have purchased them with the shoes and jewelry during his stroke of genius in New York, which he decided now had been more of a fugue state, a fit of insanity. They were an accessory that had seemed inconsequential at the checkout desk but were unfathomable to him now, a hallucination produced by a fever dream. He remembered the sales associate at the department store smiling kindly to him, a pretty young woman who leaned in and whispered in a voice that was a shade too knowing, too familiar, while she packed his extravagant purchase away in bags and boxes that were nearly as luxurious as their contents.

 _She’s a very lucky lady_ , she had said to him.

The Man in Black turned swiftly back around, bracing himself with his palms flat against the counter. He hunched over, staring at some indeterminate point on the horizon line of nothingness, into the stillness of the penthouse. He stayed that way for several minutes. Eventually, his eyes fell, settling on the blue dress, down to where it had been shed in a puddle by the footrest of a reading chair.

He loosened the stranglehold of his necktie and took a few long gulps from his glass of wine.

It wasn’t lovely, but it was all right.

When he toed open the glass door to the terrace, he came bearing a glass in each hand, and a bath towel folded over his arm. Dolores was drifting happily at the the opposite end of the pool, treading in place with her head bobbing above the surface, wearing not much else besides a roguish grin. It broke open wider when she saw him enter.

“You should come join me,” she called, her voice skipping like a stone over the water, both an invitation and a dare. “It’s almost like a bath in here.”

The Man in Black watched her warily. “Not nearly drunk enough for that yet.”

“Scrooge,” she accused, sticking her tongue out at him.

He shrugged in acceptance of his judgment, setting the towel down on one of the lounge chairs nearby, and Dolores’s wine glass at his feet. She gave him what appeared to be a coy once-over, and then swam out to greet him, long white limbs unfurling in blurred-out slow motion. She perched herself on folded arms just over the edge of the pool, a siren lying patiently in wait. It was a sight that terrified as much as it captivated. The Man in Black turned his head away, as if seeking refuge out over the terrace banister, into the quiet dark overlooking the sea. It was featureless but for the distant flicker of Macau’s skyline, little white and red pinholes straining through the fog.

“You can look at me, you know,” Dolores suggested. The way she said it made it sound like a confession, or maybe solicitous of one. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her head cocked against one gleaming shoulder. “After all, it’s nothing you haven’t seen before. Isn’t that right?”

He hummed a truncated laugh that could have been confirmation or denial, and committed to neither.

“I’m going to get a fire going,” he said finally, looking down at her and nevertheless feeling as if their positions were reversed, that he was the one who had been flung back into the deep end. “That’s as festive as I am inclined to get these days. You’ll be chilly when you get out. There’s a towel for you here when you’re ready.”

“Thank you, William. That’s very considerate.”

“What’s mine is yours,” he added, sweeping an arm out to indicate. “Enjoy it.”

Dolores reached for the wine and took a slow drink. Her eyes never left him.

“I intend to,” she said from behind the glass.

The Man in Black nodded once and escaped back inside, beset by a low-grade, formless dread. He knew it well, knew that it was not that kind to be drowned with booze, but he tried anyway, finishing the dregs of his glass and pouring another with resourceful urgency. The moral boundary lay shattered in the rear-view. What sprawled before him was the open road of transgression.

He almost chased the whole thing down, what would have been half the remains of the bottle, before he thought better of it. Instead, he went to the bathroom to relieve himself and splash some cold water on his face.

The tap hissed noisily into the drain as he stared into the mirror. He thought again about what Dolores had said to him down below, what it was that she imagined he could have been. He envied this fantasy, if he was honest with himself. He found it pleasurable to contemplate, in the way one would an elegant mathematical theorem, or the revelatory twist in a cleverly plotted story.

His reflection offered no such reassurances. No hooded wraith or disfigured beast stared back from within the vanity cabinet. Only the unremarkable countenance of an old man, one whose own story plodded and heaved toward an unceremonious ending. The bulk of its pages yellowed far behind him.

The chapter that lay before him now was already written. He had authored it himself, and he knew enough to understand that he had done so the moment he first saw the dress in the window in New York, hanging there on display like a pretty blue Chekhov’s gun. Its significance was preordained, a shadow lurking over him. To imagine it upon her was to imagine taking it off. That was the symbolic essence of a dress, to be constituted in the tantalizing possibility of tearing it away. Consciously or not, he had planned for it all along.

The Man in Black’s dread arose from the most tantalizing possibility of all, which was to repeat his mistakes under the deluded pretense of learning from them. Dolores’s essence, which dogged him like a curse, was that of his own folly. Of all the mistakes he had made — too numerous to tally, and accumulating a body count — she was the worst among them. The crown jewel in his jester’s cap.

“I am fettered,” he admitted to the mirror.

He slammed the faucet off and hung his head over the sink, droplets gathering along the lines of his face and spattering down in slow, uneven intervals. After a time spent considering his predicament, replaying pivotal scenes in his head like the damning DELOS data streams, he could endure it no longer. It was better to come to terms with his fate, with the humbling inevitability of his own longing. Its recursive path followed from beginning to end to beginning again, all points conjoined in a maddening loop.

He straightened up. He dried his face, smoothed his hair back, and made himself presentable.

In the reading room once more, the Man in Black set to work. He crouched before the fireplace and pulled prefabricated logs from an iron rack beside the hearth, as perfectly trapezoidal as faceted gems. He arranged them with the thoughtless precision that evidences a task repeated time and time again.

Tinder and kindling came from a jar at his feet. He held it up in both hands and gave its contents a shake. Sticks and dead grass, surreptitious souvenirs from the Park, rattled around like shards of brown glass. For any other guest, such an infraction risked a lifetime ban, possible legal charges. From the Man in Black, it was behavior DELOS grudgingly tolerated.

He glanced at the flowers rotting in the kitchen. DELOS tolerated a lot of things.

As he scattered the pilfered fire-starter, he heard the sliding door from the pool deck opening and closing. Dolores’s bare feet were silent on the floor, so he counted off the rhythm of her footsteps as he imagined them in his head. Slow and purposeful, like a sad song.

He fetched a narrow box from atop the mantel. When he knelt back down to strike the long match against its side, she spoke from somewhere in the space behind him.

“It doesn’t turn on by itself?”

Earlier in the night, the question would have made him laugh.

The Man in Black held his breath as he turned to look over his shoulder. Dolores had folded herself up in the towel and again in the great leather couch, a pearl glistening in the yawning flesh of an oyster. She watched him with her chin in hand, an elbow affixed to the generous armrest.

He exhaled through his nose. “It can.”

“But you like doing it the old-fashioned way.”

He forced a smile. “I have a hard time letting go of some things.”

Dolores stretched lavishly, playfully. “The rule-bending renegade, keeper of old traditions.”

“You have no idea.”

With some effort, the Man in Black turned his attention back to the task at hand. He threw the match into the firebox with a dismissive swing. Sparks leapt and flew. In an instant they became licking flames, creeping up to taste the pale, untainted firewood.

“Paper is hard to come by these days,” he said, conversational, unsheathing a poker from its housing. He blew gently at the growing fire, stabbing the whole configuration at strategic points. “When I was a kid we used to crumple it up, use that to start a fire. Newsprint, magazines, that sort of thing.”

“You burned _paper_?” Dolores’s offense was palpable.

“It wasn’t such an expensive commodity back then. Dirt cheap, actually. Commonplace and disposable. Funny how things come full circle.”

“But you still have trees, clearly. Books, timber—”

“Those books up there are fossils. We didn’t run out of the raw materials, we transformed the medium. There’s no need to print words or illustrations or photographs. It’s all a bunch of bits, ones and zeros.”

“Everything’s like that wall with the woman inside of it? And the map?”

“Uh-huh. Just about.”

“Where does it all go when you’re not using it?”

That time, the Man in Black really did almost laugh. He thought about it for a moment.

“Nowhere and everywhere,” he said, and heard Dolores scoff in disdain. He shrugged. “You asked.”

“And that’s not an answer. Not a real one. Not the whole one.” She sighed, and whatever indignation there was evaporated with it. “It’s just an abstraction.”

The Man in Black nodded distractedly.

“Yeah,” he sighed, too weary to thread yet another slipshod excuse through the eye of a needling question. She was right. He was full of shit. He stared into the crackling guts of the fire, unblinking, until his eyes began to hurt.

“I’m sorry, Dolores,” he said tersely, when the fire commenced to thrive without supervision. He pushed up against his knees, to his feet, replacing the poker in its scabbard with a toss just short of vindictive. The clanging noise it made seemed inappropriately and egregiously loud, and he regretted his error immediately, yet another toppling domino in an endless stream of bad judgments. “I’m sorry that’s all I can offer you.”

“No more woebegone bullshit,” she reminded him, affectionately.

“Touché."

He felt her approaching at his back, a cautious, meandering prowl around the coffee table and across the Turkish rug.

It wasn’t dread that swelled inside him when her arms came around his waist yet again, nor when she stood up on her toes to brush her lips beside his ear. Not even when he felt the towel fall, observing as one bleach-white corner landed over the vamp of his shoe, the brutal finality contained in such a small detail.

It was desirous fury, that hateful old contagion, burning him up again.

He had worked tirelessly to contain it. All evening, and all his life. To set it carefully aside, permitting it only to writhe tortuously in place like the fire at his feet. Nevertheless, it spat and hissed and fumed, chewed and gnashed its wicked teeth, leaving its blackening bite marks on all it consumed.

“It’s not all you can give me,” Dolores said against his neck, in a voice made of silk.

With gritted teeth, the Man in Black turned to face her, wrenching her arms away and holding them up at her sides. He thrilled at how small her wrists felt inside his hands. He shook her by them, just once, like he was trying to make a point of it somehow.

It wasn’t very hard, not violent, but it was enough to frighten. It would have frightened anyone. He waited for it to emerge, searching her face for any flickering trace of fear, his eyes traveling hungrily over her. The faintest twinge would have sustained him.

Dolores only gazed back at him, unbowed. Her eyes were kind, as they always were. If she betrayed a trace of anything, it might have been a knowing smile.

He couldn’t remember if it was even possible for her to be afraid of him. If, in his frenzied scheme, he had left room for that somewhere inside of her.

He wasn’t sure if that would have made it worse.

“What if you were right all along,” he said, in what would have been a low and predatory growl, had he not cracked around the last syllable. “What if I did come here to take your life. Take you away with me, forever.”

“To live in a dream? In your kingdom?” It was the earnestness in how she said it, the absence of any intended malice, that made the question feel so much more cruelly and paradoxically like a taunt.

He spied a twinge of something, there, right then. Gone in the blink of an eye, but he saw it plainly, a wince like the grinding of a spur. It wasn’t fear. It could have been pain. It might have been pity.

“Because you _can’t_ ,” Dolores said, rising up on her toes again so she could sway dangerously close, so close that he caught the scent of her in his mouth. He lifted his chin just in time, enough to slip the impending kiss by a razor’s edge. "You would have done it already. You told me yourself. You tried.”

“So you trust Death, then?” The Man in Black licked his lower lip without realizing it. “You trust him not to lie?”

“You’re not lying,” Dolores said, gravely certain.

His grip on her must have loosened. Her palms were sliding freely up his chest, at a pace that qualified as torment. His own floated uselessly beside him, as if declaring surrender at half-mast.

She undid the ramshackle remains of his tie, followed by the uppermost shirt button he had not yet torn free himself. He found his own hands drifting back to her, up her elbows, over her shoulders.

“Dolores,” he said, a futile warning. She smoothed his collar and her eyes slipped back to his.

“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s all right to have wanted that.”

He screwed his face up in disgust. “No, no it isn’t. Don’t lie to me. Don’t say that shit.”

“I’m not. Why do you keep pretending you didn’t know this was going to happen?”

“It’s not _all right_ , don’t you fucking condescend to me.”

“How many times has it happened before?”

His eyes were wild as he stepped toward her, against her, erasing what small distance remained between them. He took her face in his hands, thumbs cradled around her ears, studying her. Desperate for her to sneer at him, spurn him, crumple in terror. Put him out of his misery.

“You still want it,” she said, the realization a transient flare of a smile. Her eyes were glistening. She held onto him as if for dear life. “Even now. Oh, William. Would you? If ever you found a way?”

“I have moved heaven and earth,” he said, contorting over each word with spiteful precision. “There will _never_ be a way.”

Dolores lunged into him again, her arms flying around his neck, and the Man in Black, architect of his own undoing, gave in.

He kissed her vengefully, until she gasped small noises into his mouth and her breath ran ragged. They twisted there together in front of the fire, the Man in Black entangled with her as if in eternal torment. When he at last pulled away, he saw her cheeks ablaze, the skin around her mouth rubbed pink and raw, rosy in the firelight. How the sight moved him, sentimental fool that he was.

Wordlessly, compelled by a dark and unseen force, he bent his head, placing a kiss like a brand on the naked skin of her shoulder. His hand curled around the back of her neck, through the dampened hair at her nape. She shuddered beneath him.

When he pulled away to look back down at her, her lips were parted, her pupils blown wide. He allowed himself a moment to relish in his handiwork.

Dolores had to wrestle to tear her eyes away from his. When she managed, she threw a sidelong glance across the penthouse, toward the somber staircase ascending to the tower’s pinnacle.

“What is it,” he said, hoarsely. It was supposed to be a question. It didn’t come out that way.

“Take me upstairs,” she told him. There was a honeyed mesmerism in the request. “Take me to bed with you.”

The Man in Black twitched a pained smile. Of course. It was the last frontier she could hope to conquer here, the final intimacy pending siege. To see where the monster slept. He nodded.

“OK,” he said weakly.

Dolores touched his cheek with the backs of her knuckles. She led him along, fingers hooked in his, as surely as if she knew the way. His heel tread over the hem of the fallen dress.

Upstairs, the long corridor did not augur their approach. As they walked, it kept its shadows pulled around it like a cloak. The Man in Black came to Dolores’s side, to steer her by her hip. His sight adjusted quickly to the dark.

They passed paintings that appeared only as twisting brush strokes bubbling over canvas, their wrath imprisoned by baroque frames. Still lives and odd photographs were hazy premonitions, the full extent of their subject matter obscured. Dolores gave a few of them a lingering look, as if stringing the beats of a story together from a crude translation.

One last door awaited them. With his heart in his throat, the Man in Black turned the handle. It swung open like a jaw.

The heavy curtains were agape, inviting the dim and humid glow of the night, bleached lighter by water vapor and the horizon’s far-flung industrial shimmer. Blanketed by clouds, it was a formless void, turning room a twilight color.

The sheets on the bed were as misshapen as he’d left them, ripped aside in the throes of a nightmare he no longer recalled. Suitably poetic.

Dolores didn’t seem to notice. Her hands leapt to his shoulders, dragging him in with her by insistent fistfuls of his shirt. The Man in Black kicked the door shut behind him, rousing a flinty grin from her. It shone up at him like a candle in the dark.

He covered her with his body, with his mouth, as they staggered into bed at an interlocking angle, Dolores in a backwards, trusting fall against the mattress. She was fumbling at his shirt, legs canting around his thighs and over the backs of his knees, squirming under him, reckless with lust. He pinned her with her wrists over her head, stilled her with a grinding roll of his hips. She gasped, and he had to subdue his own strangled groan.

“Easy, easy,” he soothed into her ear. “One night is all the time in the world.”

She turned her head into his, lassoing him into another kiss that knocked their teeth together, that disintegrated as it progressed. Neither of them could locate its boundaries. He broke first, dragging down the length of her neck, along the breakneck pulse hidden in her throat. Its effect was the opposite of calming. She strained up against him in an electric arc, little moans flowering and bursting in her breath as it came fast and heavy. The sound tore through his own patience like shotgun spray.

He leaned back to finish the job she had clumsily started. He ripped the the button-down out of his waistband and the straggling buttons almost clean off. Dolores was working at his belt buckle, which took priority enough that he abandoned the task of shrugging the shirt from his shoulders in order to assist.

She worked a hand inside his pant leg before he could stay her explorations, watching his face eagerly as her fingers traced up the length of him. He hissed, and she laughed in triumph. The Man in Black surveyed her with frightening intensity, his eyes so hot they could have cauterized.

“Is it so entertaining, knowing what you’ve done to me?”

“Yes,” she declared, and repeated the motion, this time with a hard drag by the heel of her hand. He bit down a noise and seized her by the wrist. His bruised hand slid between her legs, rocked against the swollen ridge. It sent a dull throb of pain up through his knuckles. Dolores cried out with obvious pleasure.

“Two can play that game,” he assured her, pushing expensive fabric aside, his rough fingers up inside her. Two, then three, in an unforgiving curve. She lifted her head and threw it back against the bed again. His voice, graveled and thick, trailed off in pensive comment. “Far be it from me, to resist a game...”

Gradually, tortuously, through the unremitting ache in his own hand, he worked her toward a precipitous edge. When she grew close, he released her wrist, and her hands jumped immediately to his forearm, squeezing so tightly he could see his flesh whitening underneath. He felt the movement of his own tendons against the inside of her grip.

With a villainous smile, he pulled abruptly away. The guttural protest that escaped her was a delicious animal thing, the closest he’d ever heard her come to outrage. He would have reveled in that for longer, but he was growing desperate himself, pausing only a moment to sample a taste of her from the tips of his fingers.

She watched him, entranced. When it looked like she might rise up, reach for him again, he pinned her back down by her collarbone. Her heartbeat’s hammering edge skimmed the pad of his thumb.

“I’d have half a mind to make you beg,” he mused, affecting a tone of long-suffering patience. With the other hand, he worked to free himself from his trousers, feeling Dolores’s heart race faster still.

She trembled, her fingers brushing the discolored points of his broad hand as it kept her there, pressed firm against her ribs.

“Why don’t you try it?”

The Man in Black smiled piteously, as if through the pain of a mortal wound. He did not say, _Because I already have_.

It would have been less barbaric to pull the panties down from her hips, but that would have required maneuvering, and he could not bear the thought of her legs unhooked from around his hips for one moment, not even for a tactical reprieve. Instead, he tugged them aside, sharply at the hem, with ruinous vigor. The splitting tear might as well have been deafening. Dolores jerked underneath him in surprise, and the Man in Black bowed over her like a broken arrow, nudging under the shelf of her jaw, his answer bitten into the downy ridge of her neck.

“You’ve always had,” he growled, “such a peculiar effect on me.”

He readied himself against her, a sinister slide against wet heat. She dug her knees into his sides and her nails into his shoulders, pushing marks inside the skin where their bodies met. He was covered already in the scars she’d left behind, decorated with them like a soldier. Most were invisible to everyone but him.

“I'm afraid I'm the one who is powerless here," he said, and buried himself inside her.

It was a wanton, aggressive thrust, more forceful than he had bargained for. It ripped a sharp chord from her throat, and up from within the depths of his memory, the first note of an old remembered song.

It could not be helped, even for all that he knew or would have wished to deny it. The way he fit into her was perfect, divine deception, a wrongness that made itself felt like righteous furor. It was the cruelest and most pernicious lies that were held with inalterable, fanatical conviction, that masqueraded so effortlessly as truth. She had taught him that, long ago. If only he could make it stick.

He plunged irrevocably into temptation, her legs wrapped around him as he fell. She moaned loudly and brazenly in his ear, illustrating a lack of shame that appalled him almost to the point of rage, and it was easy to get carried away by that, too easy. He held himself at bay for as long as he could, until the impossibility made a mockery of him. His pace quickened and degraded, its intention to punish.

She did, at this point, resort to begging: the open-ended, indeterminate kind with no object attached. She called out his name, and then called out to god. A funny thing, considering. _God can’t see in here_ , he thought.

Then it was just _please_ , over and over again, repeated at the falsetto whisper pitch of desperation, strangling its way out with her cheek scraping the side of his face, his teeth sucking a mean welt from the hollow of her throat. She threw an arm over her head to steady herself against the headboard. The other was wrapped around his shoulders and would not let go.

When she came, it was with her thighs convulsing around his hips, a soaring cry convulsing around a sob. It did him in. He followed with a groan that rumbled out of him like a terrible secret, his eyes clenching shut to ward its consequences away. They both crumpled, Dolores flat into the bed, the Man in Black into the listless angles of their entwining limbs.

They remained that way for a long time, not speaking, Dolores’s breath slowing into his neck, her finger tracing idle patterns into his shoulder blade.

He raised himself on his arm to look at her. The rest of her hair had come loose, a tangled spill over the sheets. A constellation was spreading from just under her ear all the way down to her breast, the after-burn of teeth and stubble.

“Sorry I fucked your hair up,” he said. It was a proxy for _Sorry I tried to scare you_ , or _Sorry I would burn the world to keep you prisoner_ , and less troublesome to offer.

Dolores snorted like he’d cracked a dumb joke. Then she looked at him like she might have understood. There was no way to tell.

“I think I’ll survive,” she said. She rolled her head back to try to see out the window. “What time is it?”

“I don’t know.”

Dolores turned over on her stomach to gaze out at the sky, and the Man in Black stroked a possessive hand down her spine, stilling at the small of her back.

“Those are whole cities out there on the horizon,” she said, not really a question.

He nodded anyway. “Yeah.”

“The air is so dense you have to squint, but those are towers just like this one. More palaces of lights and stone. So many of them they’re stacked on top of each other. They’ve even blotted out the stars.”

“A small fraction of the price we’ve paid.”

“It’s incredible. Have you ever seen anything so full of splendor?”

He looked at her bluntly, head in hand. “Absolutely.”

“You’re incorrigible.” She shoved a palm over his face.

He took her wrist and kissed it.

“Yes,” he agreed. “I am.”

There was a pit opening in his stomach, widening steadily in time with the faint bleed of dawn over the edge of the water. The bedroom was visibly lighter, paler blue.

He frowned as he toed his dress shoes off his feet. They fell to the floor over the long edge of the bed. Every muscle in his body was sore, threaded end to end with pathetically ordinary pain.

“You’ll stay the whole night with me?” Dolores started to sit up.

He eased her back down by the waist with a commanding arm. She burrowed into the sheets and up against his chest.

“Sure. We can share the dregs of the bottle.”

He pulled her close, resting his chin on the crown of her head. He felt her yawn.

“You should sleep,” he said.

“I don’t want to yet.”

“It’s all right. You’re tired. I’m fucking tired.”

“What happens if I fall asleep? If I go to sleep in the dream do I wake up in my world?”

“Relax. Don’t worry about it. Just lie here. Be here with me.”

“Next time, you should take me to one of those cities out there on the water.”

The suggestion washed over him in a sensation reminiscent of grief, and he sighed a laugh into her hair.

“Dolores,” he said. “The things I would have shown you.”

They lay there in silence, the room fading from blue to purple to pink. The minutes that passed around them buckled and condensed, sprinting away in exponents. The Man in Black felt himself frozen in time and suspended above its current. He inhabited a loophole in the laws of physics, a brief transcendence, before it all came crashing down.

Dolores’s breathing had gone long and deep. She moved to turn over in her sleep, and the Man in Black swept her flush against him, spooning at her back. It stirred her partly awake.

“No,” she moaned into her elbow. She reached down, squeezing his arm for emphasis. “I don’t want—“

“Shhh, hey—“

“No!” She twisted erratically as he tried to hold her still. “No, I don’t want to go, not yet, let me stay—“

“Go back to sleep. Dolores, go back to sleep, please.”

“William, I’m awake now, let me up. William!”

“God damn it,” he grunted, when her elbow jammed up into his stomach. The nausea that lurched was from another source entirely.

“Please, let me stay,” she whined, her struggling faltering, as the Man in Black brought his lips to her ear. He took one heaving breath to rally himself, gripped by an agony beyond comprehension.

“The night is waning fast,” he uttered, the phrase snapping him in two, “and it is precious time to me, I know.”

She went limp in his arms, as silent as the grave.

It was more than an hour later when he could will himself to move. He rose from the bed like a ghost, numbly fixing his trousers, buttoning his shirt only part of the way and at conspicuous misalignment.

He could not bring himself to look at Dolores where she lay. So he left. He closed the door gingerly behind him, against the sight of her, against the unstoppable encroachment of the light. He limped down the hallway.

Downstairs, in the kitchen, he dug through his jacket pocket over the dining room chair until he could locate his phone. Three missed calls barked up at him, and a text message from a number he didn’t recognize, but he knew the area code, first three digits of the department.

He hunted for the thumb drive, tossing it on the dining table next to his cuff links. He chewed on his lip and dialed the number. The director picked up after two rings.

“What part of ‘do not disturb’ did I fail to intelligibly convey,” he demanded. He began to pace in fits and starts. He didn’t pay attention to the answer, a tinny voice nagging bullshit in his ear. He was distracted by the flowers on the bar, sagging drearily in the mug. The answer wasn’t worth his time, anyway.

“I told you I needed twelve hours. Ten, minimum.” The Man in Black tore the phone away from his face and angled his rebuke directly into the mouthpiece. “Yes, I’m aware of procedure. Fuck procedure. Take it up with QA.” He stalked into the reading room as he spoke, picking the dress up from the floor and throwing it angrily into an armchair. “I said she’ll be ready at 8 AM. I won’t be here. If I see a tech on my security feeds at 7:59 I will deal with you personally, do you understand me? Yeah. Uh-huh. Merry Christmas.”

He dropped the phone on the coffee table with a clatter and sank into the couch, exhausted, grinding the heels of his hands into his eyes.

He blinked, stared at the fireplace blearily. Not even smoldering coals lingered in the hearth. It was charred, ashen, gone; the whole apparition. In an odd, peripheral sort of way, he found that comforting.

There was a space above the mantel on the wall, between the teeming shelves of books, that struck him in that moment as subtly unbalanced. He wondered why it hadn’t been apparent to him before.

A certain kind of man, the kind of man he was not, might have anchored the empty spot with family photographs, miscellaneous schlock. The inverted version of himself, in the inverted world thousands of miles away, kept such things. They occupied walls and surfaces, transmitting constant, obligatory signals. He felt nothing when he looked at them.

He tilted his head in contemplation. It was missing a clock, he decided. That had to be it.

His uncle had owned one of fine workmanship, with a golden swinging pendulum and hands as elegant as cursive. A beautiful grandfather clock from an age gone by, and not very long ago at that. It was another artifact they didn’t make anymore, replaced with soulless diodes, buzzing their incessant reminders. Time was everywhere, constant and thoughtless, all sense of its passage gunned down and left to exsanguinate. His own company was working tirelessly to incinerate the corpse.

The antique in his uncle’s possession had been a source of his obsessive interest in childhood, or so his mother had told him. He was so young he had no memory of this, but he believed it to be true.

It was the gong, she said, its eldritch ring that had fascinated and repulsed his fledgling mind. He would sit in front of it for hours, at a distance he considered safe, drawing with markers in composition books, anxious with anticipation. Waiting and listening for the announcement of the bells, faithfully on cue. The ceremony repeated itself with steadfast commitment. It did not lag behind. It did not hurry itself ahead. He loved it for its sense of honor, and feared its atonal enchantment.

It was sworn to its purpose, until the gears wore down and the mechanism began to fail, falling victim to the same force it had been created to measure. He smirked at the thought. As far back as he could recall, the contraption had been mute.

The last such clock he had seen had been inside the Park, come to think of it. He could have one designed and built to his liking. He lay back on the couch, interlacing his hands behind his head. It would be a miserly Christmas gift to himself. He would make some calls.

Cold light streamed through the window, blue stripped bare to white, filling every space with its cataclysmic flood. The Man in Black wandered through the maze in his head, trying to remember the sound of the bells.

He closed his eyes and did not sleep. He was floating, adrift, in a waking dream.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I make good on my promises. Merry Christmas to all, and god bless us, everyone.


End file.
